The heaventree of stars
Richard Hamilton British
Not on view
At the end of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the characters Molly and Bloom drift off to sleep under “[t]he heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” For this print, Hamilton posed his wife, the artist Rita Donagh, and his assistant Nigel McKernaghan as the two lovers. Using Quantel Paintbox and Photoshop, Hamilton added hand-drawn lines and other details such as a bedcover crocheted by his mother. The digital technology enabled Hamilton to work entirely from his studio at Northend, a converted farm in the Oxfordshire countryside, without having to travel to printers’ workshops, as had been his habit.