Classical Liberal Artist
About
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My Journey
My name is Maria Hammond. I am a classical liberal artist from Ukraine, based in the small medieval Swiss town of Stein am Rhein.
At eighteen I fell for a set of ideas: spontaneous order, individual freedom, a deep scepticism of the state. For the better part of a decade, they ran my life. I studied and wrote about public health, free trade, and the strange political economy of the psychedelic renaissance. I worked for classical liberal organisations across Europe. I thought of myself, first and last, as a writer.
Coming from Ukraine, I had seen what Soviet communism, and the intergenerational memory of it, does not only to an economy but to the human psyche. I believed my calling was to argue, in essays and policy workshops, for a freer and more prosperous world.
Then I went quiet.
Motherhood, the war in my home country, a move to free and safe Switzerland, and a long stretch of self-reflection rearranged something I had assumed was fixed. My policy brain, so good at the puzzles of regulation and reform, simply stopped being enough. I turned to painting almost by accident, and there I found a kind of solace the work of persuasion had never given me. Where I once tried to convince policymakers, I became obsessed with translating the human soul onto canvas: flawed, creative, and entirely unique.
I am returning to the classical liberal world I love, but through a different door.
What inspires me now is the connection between a person and their environment. The case that individuals flourish in freedom has been made, brilliantly in books, essays, and op-eds, for centuries, and I believe it. What I want to explore is the quieter part we talk less about: the way freedom can also be vertiginous, even isolating, for the person who experiences it. An essay must land on a conclusion. A painting doesn't. It can hold that tension and let you feel.
So, I paint freedom as I have lived it: liberating and beautiful, but also weighty, and inseparable from the people and places that hold us. My hands and eyes are still learning. But I hope that in these paintings you find a way to experience classical liberalism through a different prism. One of feeling, of the bond between a person and their world, and often, simply, of beauty. Because freedom is beautiful.
I welcome you to join me on my journey.
The way I paint is inspired by the techniques used by Dutch Golden Age painters: from darkness, toward one source of light.
Working in Gamblin and Rembrandt oils on oil paper and panel, I build each piece from a deep, saturated ground — teal, near-black green, ink blue — and let the subject emerge from it, lit as if by a single window. A lemon. A vase of flowers with a bee caught mid-visit. A portrait of a woman who governed with conviction. Different subjects, same discipline: strong light, deep shadow, nothing flat.
Contrast is the point. Without real darkness, light has nothing to push against — it just sits there. Every piece here is built to make the light earn its place, the same way painters worked centuries before flat, evenly-lit images became the default.
That's not incidental to the project. This is technique in service of a bigger instinct: a belief that depth — in paint, in thought, in a culture — is worth restoring, not flattening. Old ways of seeing light didn't disappear because they stopped working. They're still here, still worth the patience they demand.
My Style