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Larry Hill ArtCedar Bar 2016
2016
About the Item
The first time I heard the words “abstract expressionism” I was in New York, trying to grab another day of leave before the army shipped me overseas. At that time in 1952, while browsing through Greenwich Village, I came upon The Cedar Tavern. “That’s where the abstract expressionists raise hell,” a sophomore girl from Barnard told me. “If you’re interested in art, that’s where the action is.”
Well, my interest was piqued, but time rushed in and stole me away from that small bar, cramped with the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, and Franz Kline.
It wasn’t until I returned from a tour of duty that included 18 months serving in Korea, that I began to worship the aforementioned artists. Seemed I had brought two visions back with me to the US: Zen calligraphy, brushed with black Sumi ink on rice paper, and the haunting image, indelible in my mind, of an atomic cloud over the devastated city of Hiroshima, Japan. My god. Could this 16-odd number of painters, most of them sons of European immigrants have formed a cauldron influenced by similar visual impressions? Their large canvases bearing the storm of a kind of strange desperation grabbed me by the throat. Different from any paintings I’d seen before, they conveyed both violence and its antithesis, joy, as if that particular combination could carry an artist straight into his dreams.
And there was something else about this new wave of painting called the New York School. It was strictly American. Like jazz, it erupted from the city sidewalks of this country like an astral fist to the face of what had always belonged to an older, more foreign world.
- Creator:Larry Hill Art (1932, American)
- Creation Year:2016
- Dimensions:Height: 60 in (152.4 cm)Width: 48 in (121.92 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Fresno, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU1823210729162
Larry Hill Art
Discharged from the Army in 1955, and having been exposed to what had become the renowned New York School of Painting, I was desperate to paint. It wasn’t until I’d graduated from Fresno State and had accepted a high school teaching contract that I set goals toward becoming an abstract expressionist. Simply put, I’d seen the work of Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and my life had changed. While opening Art Trio, a commercial art business, I tried to raise the level of graphic art and illustration in Central California and at the same time pursue my love of painting. That meant buying canvas at Pacific Tent and Awning, stretching and prepping it myself, and hauling the final products to exhibit areas where nothing of their size and ilk had ever been seen before. In 1959, my large black-and-white painting “Madrid” won best oil in the first San Joaquin Art Fair and the newspaper columnist asked me to act surprised in the photo celebrating my victory. At that time, Fresno had no venues where artists could show their work. In 1961, claiming to live in Southern California, I had three paintings accepted for viewing in the Los Angeles Art Institute. Martin Janis, a respected Los Angeles art dealer, invited me to hang another four pieces in his contemporary gallery, and I felt like I had an avenue upon which I could pursue my dream. Then real life came thundering into the picture. The Institute found out that I resided in the San Joaquin Valley, a place far from any dreams, and Martin Janis called to tell me he hadn’t sold any of my paintings. However, his brother, the famed Sidney Janis in New York, had visited Martin, taken all four and sold them in his Manhattan gallery, where he’d hung them along with Kline, deKooning, and Pollock. Sidney Janis and a select number of art dealers, writers and critics had convinced the world that this group of wild men with brushes had taken the New York school from nothing to an explosive phenomenon that gave the world a new art expression that was truly American. I have always painted, sometimes more than others, sometimes, in spite of the uncertainty that plagues all artists, finding encouragement at the time I most needed it. One such time was at an Ikebana Society show where author/playwright William Saroyan left me a note describing my work as “heroic”. My one-artist shows include a 35-painting, full-gallery show in the Fresno Art Museum in 1979. My bio contains many fractures, full-out breaks, and a couple of miraculous reparations. I believe a painting (story) must have an initial dramatic impact and at second glance should include tantalizing nuances of drawing (plotting) and gestures (conflict) to stay alive.
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