William Hill, October 2020
The October Art Exhibition, “Stars and Bars: A Survey of Four Artists with Ties to Washington DC” featuring John Figura, William Hill, Stephen Lewis, Tim Vermeulen opens on October 3, 5-7 PM.
Green Kill 2020 October Art Exhibition, “Stars and Bars: A Survey of Four Artists with Ties to Washington DC” featuring John Figura, William Hill, Stephen Lewis,and 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.
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.
William Hill Exhibition
“Stars and Bars: A Survey of Four Artists with Ties to Washington DC”
Washington, D.C. in many ways is a city without an identity. A large portion of its population is transient, moving in and out with the tide of presidential cycles and affecting the cultural tenor of the city. To quote John F. Kennedy, “…it is a city of southern efficiency and Northern charm.” Because of its transient population and ever-changing political climate, as Kennedy points out, the city lacks the identity of either a northern or southern city and is driven by shifting philosophies. The main industry in Washington is that of ideas.
Historically, the city’s most promising art movement was the “Washington Color School” which boasted members such as Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Leon Berkowitz, and Tom Downing, and was championed by non-objective backers of “flat” painting such as Clement Greenburg. The “Color Field” movement differed from the other flat art movement, abstract expressionism, in that it was more about optics and less about mark making. Many of the paintings were stained onto raw canvas using the newly developed “magna” paint, which effectively dissolved the brush stroke entirely. These painters developed an almost atmospheric perspective more related to landscape painting than the flat quality of the paintings’ surface would belie.
If the New York School responded to the bustle of the city and its energy for inspiration, surely the painters in Washington responded more to a constant march of ideas, focusing the work on an inward dialog forced upon them from an outside maelstrom of political ideologies.
The artists in this show continue in that tradition of philosophical yearning, with the lines erased over time between abstraction and narration, leaving only a desire to find meaning, whether through narrative means or abstract. How else do we explain what we’ve become?