Richard Hambleton Art

Richard Hambleton (born June, 1954) is an artist-painter currently living and working in the Lower East Side of New York City. Richard Hambleton is the godfather of street art. He is the surviving member of a group who, together with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, had great success coming out of the New York City art scene during the booming art market of the 1980's. Much of Hambleton's work is compared to graffiti art, however, Hambleton considers his work to be "public art". Richard Hambleton is most famous for his "Shadowman" paintings of the early 1980s. Each painting resembles a life-sized silhouetted image of some mysterious person, a "splashy shadow figure." These "shadow paintings" were splashed and brushed with black paint on buildings and other structures across New York City. Locations were believed to be calculated for maximum impact upon unsuspecting pedestrians. Very often, a "Shadowman" could be found in a dark alley or lurking just around a street corner. Hambleton later expanded the scope of his project and painted these "shadowmen" in other cities, including Paris, London and Rome, and even on the Berlin Wall. Apart from his public art, Richard Hambleton also produced a variation of his "shadow" work, showing his "Shadowman" as a sort of "rodeo man," or rugged "Marlboro Man," often riding a bucking horse