Tim Vermeulen, “April,” 13x10 ft.

Green Kill 2020 October Art Exhibition featuring John Figura, William Hill, Stephen Lewis, Tim Vermeulen will be on display from Saturday October 3 to Saturday, October 26, 2020 with an opening party on Saturday, October 3, 2020 from 5-7 PM. 

New Normal health concerns are a primary. The customary Green Kill opening of beverages with finger foods will be covered for protection. If you wish to come on opening day, please understand that 10 people are permitted in the gallery at one time, that all attendees must were face masks, and we will us a “Non-Contact Infrared Digital Thermometer” and “Pulse Oximeter Blood Oxygen Level Monitor” for screening. There were be outside seating for your convenience. Green Kill is equipped with a heat pump so the air is constantly refreshed and the space is, as always, sanitized. 

John Figura

John Figura, Night Lights 52' x 52"

The works presented here are selections from one a series that I have been making over the course of the last few years.  Landscape painting has been a major genre in art for centuries. This body of work continues within that tradition while seeking to revitalize the genre and keep it relevant today.  The nocturnes are not just about a representational depiction of nature, but rather a single moment within nature as a place where a narrative can be presented.  

The nightscapes are representations that are synthesized through the imagination, a remembrance or a dream of the landscape.  These narratives are depicted within the beauty and intensity of the dark pastoral—a place of fear, awe, longing and contemplation, a theatre of numerous possibilities.  The paintings attempt to provoke an emotional response to a moment depicted within the sublimity of the night. 

William Hill

William Hill, “Archaic Remnants.”

My paintings start with looking out my studio window into the yard behind my house. The light playing on and through the trees hitting the grass, and the old fence creates a closed environment for study of color coming alive. This creates a world of light, shadow, density of form and transparency of color that becomes the building blocks of my painting process. The viewing process continues all through the year: revealing a world of shifting patterns. The bleak cold whitish light of winter, the warm verdant bloom of spring, the wild contrasting light of summer, and the soft fading light of late summer and fall set up an arena of shifting rhythms of form and character that commingle and gestate in painting.

The color, lines, planes, transparencies of paint become ideas: both physical and metaphorical, and get pushed around the canvas to make a situation that has its own sense of order, logic, and space. The rhythmic forms that develop are meant to correspond and evoke but not imitate the external world. As I work input from new classical music (Particularly Cage and Scelsi), some remembrances of the Washington Color School ( Gilliam, Davis, and Berkowitz), my ever present thought about Finnegans Wake, and our crazy political machinations wind their way into the fabric of the work in progress. The components and individual sense of the painting reveals itself as the entire surface configurations coalesce into carriers of meaning.   

These shifting variations of form and color perform a variety of functions that act as catalysts for the viewer’s engagement in the process. The viewer’s eyes move across the surface assessing all of the materials it sees, and this gets the viewer involved with the image formation process.  Associative thoughts get implied to the viewer. The viewer can become enmeshed in the painting as the experience builds into a manifold experience that becomes richer with repeated VIEWING. The encoded material that I have developed on the canvas slips out of the paintings and goes into the viewer’s subconscious. After hanging around in the back of the viewer’s mind, the stuff pops back out as ethereal breadcrumbs for the conscious mind to nibble on. 

Stephen Lewis

Stephen Lewis, “Regret,” 2020, Oil on canvas, 6x5 ft

Stephen Lewis is a painter and printmaker who is work is primarily concerned with art of observation of both the sociopolitical and natural world. In that sense, his work is unique in that it inhabits two distinct genres; naturalism and political art, but the artist sees his practice as incorporating the same principals in the creation of both bodies of work -they are tied together by the artists unique ability to articulate realities that only become obvious thru monastic observation and study.

   “The message that American pop culture is polluting the world isn’t anything new. But, Lewis sends it in such an over the top manner that the viewer gets pulled into the imagery. How a person who looks as serene and contemplative as Lewis does in his self-portrait can channel so much anger into his paintings is anyone’s guess. But it isn’t just the anger that makes his work compelling it’s the skill with which he translates it into art”

 Ferdinand postman, the Washington post

  While in Washington, dc he was one of the co-directors of signal66 a 3000 sq. ft. gallery and exhibition space that was widely accepted as the dominate gallery in the city during its tenure.

His work has been reviewed or featured in diverse publications including; the Washington post, art news, timeout, high times, casa vogue, and the New Yorker.

  He currently resides in Port Ewen NY with his wife and daughter and is the co-publisher of the art / satirical print newspaper” The Quiet American”. He currently records under the moniker “the royal wylds” and is attempting to re invigorate plein aire painting in a way that doesn’t suck.

Tim Vermeulen

Tim Vermeulen, “Meditation IV,” 8.5 X 11.5 ft.

Tim Vermeulen was born in Paterson, NJ. The son of a funeral director, he was raised in a rigidly Calvinist household. He is understandably plagued with thoughts of guilt and damnation. He received a B.A. from Calvin College and an M.F.A. in Painting and Drawing from The University of Illinois Champaign/Urbana. Tim was an art professor for 17 years, first at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL, and then at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, MD. He is currently a full-time painter living in Maryland and he is represented by Packer Schopf Gallery. Recent solo exhibitions include George Billis Gallery, New York, NY (2019, 2016), Adventureland, Chicago, IL (2018) Mount Saint Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, MD (2013), Mt. Comfort Gallery, Indianapolis, IN (2011), Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, IL (2010). 

My paintings are attempts to articulate in visual form, through symbolic and allegorical stories, a chaotic web of emotions and ideas that is at once deeply personal and about our universal condition. My work is part of a process of wrestling for self-discovery through autobiographical narratives, in many cases involving self-portraiture. Often the narratives are based on established stories or series from literary sources (e.g., Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Odyssey, the Seven Deadly Sins). I interpret the sources in a way that allows me to refer to issues such as personal anxiety about the delicate nature of the body, the battle between the true self and the false self, feelings about my strict Calvinist upbringing, and/or the elusive task of personality integration. A common thread that carries through much of my work is a presentation of a world of contradictions, polarities, and paradox. 

15th century Northern European painting heavily influences the technique and subject matter of my work. I am particularly drawn to the saturated symbolism, quirky perspective and layered surfaces of artists like Roger Campin and Hugo Van der Goes. There is a peculiar way in which the meaning of this work is married to the technique. One accesses the meaning of these paintings through the process of their creation as well as through the subject matter. The obsessive character of the technique of many Flemish artists seeks the same home of conviction and insight that I look for in my work. This is a particularly Northern form of expressionism that seeks release not in big brushes and wild gestures but in a slow, painstaking process.