Jane Haslem Gallery: Bill Hill: Reviews: Page 1

Sarah Tanguy
May 2006
Curator & Critic
based in
Washington DC

Rich in associations the painted canvases of Bill Hill engage the body in retracing their gestures. Swirls and splashes counterpoint broader passages to create interwoven arabesques of varying density and depth. In the process of a king in these lyrical abstractions, the imagination awakens. One starts to hear sounds, faint at first, but with increasing intensity - a landscape teaming with rustling trees, perhaps, a spoken fragment of concrete poetry.

The paintings begin quite simply with a wash of a single color. From there, Hill treats the brush stroke as his primary building block, and individual formal elements, including line, color, and space, as attending means to improvise and ultimately resolve his atmospheric compositions. Over time, forms emerge and coalesce into zones that evoke the fore, middle and background of a landscape. Throughout this process, his concern remains the development of the work, letting aggregate clusters and rhythms reveal themselves, not producing a narrative or nameable objects.

In this new group of paintings, the air flows more easily as the spaces between marks open up and color helps establish discrete areas on the picture plane. Instead of a single perspective, lines and masses chart a meandering course that shifts in and out of focus. The lessons Hill learned over twenty years ago from Sam Gilliam and Gene Davis still apply: a painting can be a complex collaborative act for both creator and viewer, and a permeable order can be coaxed out of seeming chaos with a foundation drawn from nature. -Sarah Tanguy

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Nebulous Beauty at Haslem Gallery
By Michael O’Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post
June 16, 2006

As Bill Hill describes it, his art, on view at the Jane Haslem Gallery, arises from a mixture of three things: abstract landscape; the influence of the Washington Color School; and what the painter somewhat cheekily refers to as a “Bill Hill something-or-other.”

The first two components are self-explanatory. With titles such as “Chesapeake I,” “Chesapeake II” and Chesapeake III,” as well as “Field” and “Hillside,” and with colors calling to mind everything from the water of the bay to the fog-shrouded mountains of Western Maryland, the connection to place is evident. So, too, is the legacy of such Washington painters as the late Leon Berkowitz and Sam Gilliam, in whose studio building Hill rented space during much of the 1980s. The genetic link between Gilliam’s dropcloth-like spattered canvases and Berkowit’z misty sprays of atmospheric color and Hill’s paintings – which have both a gestural quality and an all-over-ness – is hare to miss. This is not to say that Hill has merely digested and regurgitated the styles of those who came before him. The towering shadows of Berkowitz and Gilliam in Hill’s work are something the artist recognizes even as he struggles to stake out a territory he can call his own

More slippery, though, than the first two ingredients is that certain je ne sais quoi, that ineffable something that Hill himself admits is the most “nebulous and complex” aspect of his art. An art that he compares, during a recent gallery walk-through, to a “running commentary” on his life.

Just don’t expect it to translate easily into words.

Hill may use the word “commentary,” but the literary antecedent he has in mind is James Joyce, a writer whose meaning isn’t grasped in individual sentences or paragraphs, but as a whole. Similarly, Hill cites the influence on his work of the composer John Cage, whose music provides frequent accompaniment to Hill’s studio practice, and whom Hill calls the “strange nephew” of writer Joyce, for the way in which each artist builds a composition more like architecture – brick by brick and beam by beam – than like a picture.

Consider Hill’s “Cathedral of Air II” and “Cathedral of Air III,” which, true to their titles, feel at once as substantial as a church and as immaterial as the wind.

Consider also that the former is listed as having been painted from 1996 to 2006, and the latter from 2001 to 2006.

There is, you see, an additive quality to Hill’s images, which are as layered as an orchestral composition. You don’t so much hear notes or individual instruments as you feel their cumulative effect.

This is, then, what Hill means by “running commentary.” Rather than snapshots of places he’s been to, his paintings are more akin to a time-based medium like music or literature. Remembered rather than rendered, they are pictures of journey rather than destinations.





				Sarah Tanguy May 2006 Curator & Critic based in Washington DC Rich in associations the painted canvases of Bill Hill engage the body in retracing their gestures. Swirls and splashes counterpoint broader passages to create interwoven arabesques of varying density and depth. In the process of a king in these lyrical abstractions, the imagination awakens. One starts to hear sounds, faint at first, but with increasing intensity - a landscape teaming with rustling trees, perhaps, a spoken fragment of concrete poetry. The paintings begin quite simply with a wash of a single color. From there, Hill treats the brush stroke as his primary building block, and individual formal elements, including line, color, and space, as attending means to improvise and ultimately resolve his atmospheric compositions. Over time, forms emerge and coalesce into zones that evoke the fore, middle and background of a landscape. Throughout this process, his concern remains the development of the work, letting aggregate clusters and rhythms reveal themselves, not producing a narrative or nameable objects. In this new group of paintings, the air flows more easily as the spaces between marks open up and color helps establish discrete areas on the picture plane. Instead of a single perspective, lines and masses chart a meandering course that shifts in and out of focus. The lessons Hill learned over twenty years ago from Sam Gilliam and Gene Davis still apply: a painting can be a complex collaborative act for both creator and viewer, and a permeable order can be coaxed out of seeming chaos with a foundation drawn from nature. -Sarah Tanguy ========================================== Nebulous Beauty at Haslem Gallery By Michael O’Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer The Washington Post June 16, 2006 As Bill Hill describes it, his art, on view at the Jane Haslem Gallery, arises from a mixture of three things: abstract landscape; the influence of the Washington Color School; and what the painter somewhat cheekily refers to as a “Bill Hill something-or-other.” The first two components are self-explanatory. With titles such as “Chesapeake I,” “Chesapeake II” and Chesapeake III,” as well as “Field” and “Hillside,” and with colors calling to mind everything from the water of the bay to the fog-shrouded mountains of Western Maryland, the connection to place is evident. So, too, is the legacy of such Washington painters as the late Leon Berkowitz and Sam Gilliam, in whose studio building Hill rented space during much of the 1980s. The genetic link between Gilliam’s dropcloth-like spattered canvases and Berkowit’z misty sprays of atmospheric color and Hill’s paintings – which have both a gestural quality and an all-over-ness – is hare to miss. This is not to say that Hill has merely digested and regurgitated the styles of those who came before him. The towering shadows of Berkowitz and Gilliam in Hill’s work are something the artist recognizes even as he struggles to stake out a territory he can call his own More slippery, though, than the first two ingredients is that certain je ne sais quoi, that ineffable something that Hill himself admits is the most “nebulous and complex” aspect of his art. An art that he compares, during a recent gallery walk-through, to a “running commentary” on his life. Just don’t expect it to translate easily into words. Hill may use the word “commentary,” but the literary antecedent he has in mind is James Joyce, a writer whose meaning isn’t grasped in individual sentences or paragraphs, but as a whole. Similarly, Hill cites the influence on his work of the composer John Cage, whose music provides frequent accompaniment to Hill’s studio practice, and whom Hill calls the “strange nephew” of writer Joyce, for the way in which each artist builds a composition more like architecture – brick by brick and beam by beam – than like a picture. Consider Hill’s “Cathedral of Air II” and “Cathedral of Air III,” which, true to their titles, feel at once as substantial as a church and as immaterial as the wind. Consider also that the former is listed as having been painted from 1996 to 2006, and the latter from 2001 to 2006. There is, you see, an additive quality to Hill’s images, which are as layered as an orchestral composition. You don’t so much hear notes or individual instruments as you feel their cumulative effect. This is, then, what Hill means by “running commentary.” Rather than snapshots of places he’s been to, his paintings are more akin to a time-based medium like music or literature. Remembered rather than rendered, they are pictures of journey rather than destinations.

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