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Drawing is one of the oldest forms of human expression, and through their chosen medium Edith Hammar belongs to an artistic tradition that stretches back thousands of years. It is believed that drawing was used as a specialized form of communication before the invention of the written language, demonstrated by the production of cave and rock paintings around 30,000 years ago. Drawing became significant as an art form around the late 15th century, with artists and master engravers such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519), Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) and Martin Schongauer (c. 1448–1491). In the 20th century, Modernism encouraged “imaginative originality” and some artists’ approach to drawing became less literal, more abstract. World-renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973), Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960 – 1988) helped challenge the status quo, with drawing being very much at the centre of their practice, and often re-interpreting traditional technique.

Hammar, “whose most important tools are graphite and ink”, considers drawing to be “very direct” and instrumental in reshaping a narrative, or illustrating a fantasy. Their images, of gender non-conforming characters, often feature recurring motifs that are either real life situations or personal fantasies, and Hammar’s drawings sometimes also relate to works by celebrated earlier artists, firmly established in the canon of queer art history.

A favor (where someone is doing a loved one a favor by piercing their ears with a safety pin, a theme with strong ties to the award-winning graphic novel Portal, 2023, where the protagonist Elijah, in an erotically charged sequence of images pierces the ears of Eki with a safety pin) for instance, with its partial attention to delicately drawn contours and lines, evoke the sketches of Jean Cocteau (1889 – 1963), whilst also showing similarities to Andy Warhol’s drawings from the 1950s. The light figure in the foreground, for example, is particularly reminiscent of Warhol’s way of drawing (to some extent probably inspired by Henri Matisse [1869 – 1954]) in the 1950s: highly distilled and sure of line, yet loose.

These line drawings came from the period before Andy Warhol “became Andy Warhol”, when he was known primarily as a successful commercial illustrator. Using ink and graphite, Warhol investigated the possibilities of the hand-drawn line and filled entire sketchbooks with overtly homoerotic drawings of men. Portraits, which were loving, humorous depictions of the male form, were complemented by studies of shoes, feet, torsos, and genitalia. A common feature in these sketchbooks are intimate depictions of unidentified men, and closeups focusing on the waistline of trousers and jeans with attention to buttons and undone zippers (in works like Male Lower Torso Thumbs in Pockets, c. 1956, ink and graphite on paper, 45.4 x 39.1 cm).

Considering the above, parallels can also be drawn to other works by Hammar. A good fly (with its erotically charged reference to a zipper in a pair of trousers) lies close at hand thematically. Hammar has also, in her graphic novels, depicted trousers in a sexual context, for instance in her award-winning Homo Line (2020), where a full spread (p. 130 – 131) depicts a closeup of the waistlines of three characters wearing, what appears to be, leather trousers (one of the preceding pages, 128, depicts a road sign inscribed Nahkahousuntie [Leather Pants Road]).

It’s hard to discuss the art of Hammar without making comparisons, also, to the iconic queer comic art of Touko Laaksonen (aka Tom of Finland, 1920 – 1991). Hammar also refers to Tom of Finland (and his nocturnal pick-up trips along the Esplanade, or in the Observatory Park, in Helsinki, where he found casual sex partners, with or without arousing uniforms, during the blackouts of the wartime years in the 1940s) in her book Homo Line, where she emphasizes that “homosexuality is […] an unavoidable part of Finnish history.”

In her review of Hammar’s graphic novel Portal (‘Edith of Finland. Edith Hammar takes us to the queer Helsinki of the 1950s’, Nordic Art Review, 17 November 2023) Helen Korpak (art critic, photographer and visiting teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki and the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture), however, writes: “[…] although Hammar often makes visual references to Tom of Finland, they do not depict clichés such as quick anonymous hookups. There’s never a rush to get anywhere; the artist’s subjects have endless time to enjoy themselves and be kinky.”

Copyright Firestorm Foundation