Rich in associations, the painted canvases of Bill Hill engage the body in retracing its gestures. Swirls and splashes counterpoint broader passages to create interwoven arabesques of varying density and depth. 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.
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.
