An Australian icon, painted on location.
Hamish Fleming’s number one artist tip is don’t eat the paint. His number two tip is that forging your mum’s signature to swap from a STEM class into art in year 10 is definitely worth it.
From a young age, Fleming has always been interested in “stuff.” Anyone who has seen his work can attest to that.
From BIC lighters, to jackets and to the humble air freshener, Fleming's body of work aims to capture medium and everyday environments in great detail from Still Life to landscape - capturing a feeling in time just as much as it captures the detail of an Adelaide Hill’s road or humble Hungry Jacks.
At first, this interest in stuff led him to the theatre with one day hopes that he would become a theatre director. The self-admitted fault of "wanting to be a bit of a dictator” drew him to the more solitary career and life of an artist, well, that and a longing to prove people wrong.
A familiar streetscape, Gunson Street.
There is no doubt he has seen astronomical social media growth within the last year, especially on his Instagram - mostly from his liminal landscapes that make up South Australia which speaks to people. For some, he paints their local Hungry Jacks, which they always end up at after a night out, while for others, he paints the roads they learned to drive on with their dad.
For those who might know nothing about our state, there is a liminal element of his work that almost forces them to slow down and take it in; making it feel like you're out wandering the streets with him late at night.
This nocturnal element of his work comes from COVID, where for 6 months, 6 nights a week, in a Mazda 212 Fleming woke up at 2pm and delivered pizza late into the night.
This nocturnal look at the world let him see our state from a different point of view. For example, how many times do you see a street light go out? Fleming's personal record as a delivery driver was 46.
This habit of noticing the unknown bleeds through his work, capturing streets that most would just drive by, roads blending into each other, the geologic elements which make up each cliff face or the way some streetlights shift from blue to yellow based on the hour.
Another point of interest in Fleming’s work is in how he paints. For most, the idea of painting in the dead of night with only a headlight and a paint brush for defence would be a terrifying ordeal, but Fleming relishes it.
“You meet people, but not that many,” he says.
Interestingly, he’s recently had people pull over to speak with him knowing his work from Instagram, shocked to see him in the flesh. Of course, he still has some safeguards, like painting in areas he knows, and mostly pre-scouting well ahead of time and still being aware enough to know when a quick getaway is needed; however, more often than not, he enjoys feeling like Batman as he works long into the night and into the wee hours of the morning on his landscapes.
Chances are, you might drive past Hamish during a painting excursion.
As for his studio work, Fleming enjoys the ability to add symbolism into his work and to paint modern things in a pre-modernist style, such as a car air freshener or a bottle of extra gum. For how he decides to paint these objects, to put it simply, “it was there”, leading to a subtle symbolism after all.
“It is intense, some of the more metaphoric content, and you can sort of draw a bunch of conclusions based off that,” he says.
In recent years Fleming has also taken up teaching, starting at 19 at a local gallery teaching adult classes after being approached through his much smaller Instagram at the time. It was something he wasn’t sure if he would be good at, yet he quickly found a passion for it, realising that he knew more than he thought.
In the subsequent years, he has transitioned more into teaching secondary students, where he has found joy in passing on his own skills and seeing how blunt kids and teenagers could truly be. For Fleming, he found self-education and mentorship more useful than his short time in Art School, classifying himself as a more trial-and-error person looking to go beyond the textbook and simply wanting to focus on his art.
In part, that was what first drew him to The Mill in 2022, for him, he is thankful there's “a group of very dedicated people who really care about what they're doing.”
Hamish in his studio at The Mill.
Through The Mill he has been given the chance to focus on his art rather than the logistics of having instant hot water, enjoying the fact that it goes beyond simply renting a space and that there are career development opportunities and networking potential for himself and other artists - a huge upside.
He’s also excited to announce that he will be hosting an exhibition entitled Nowhere is Ever Really That Dark, opening October 30 in The Mill’s Gallery, with the hope that the exhibit will “be making a case against binary perception stuff where something is either A or B. It's not going to be like that, it's like halfway between the two. It's undefinable.”
The exhibition will be his biggest to date, having started work on it in 2024.
Fans of his work can expect all the hallmarks they come to love and some more unexpected elements, like a giant pink flamingo and other completely new and unseen work, with Fleming hoping that it will be a good chance for online fans of his work to get a chance to finally see it in person.
Words: Olivia McCormac
Artwork images: Hamish Fleming
Studio photo: Neasan