Larry Hill Art
Off Broadway
2016

Name: Off Broadway
Brand: Larry Hill Art
Price: 3800 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

“I’ll find me a place by the river now and give up all my story lines.” – Van Morrison All of these paintings originated in the past year, but I suspect they truly began in 1955 after I returned from the army to complete my college education at Fresno State. Having discovered the heroic-scaled canvases of the abstract impressionists while away, I changed my major to art. Soon, after enrolling into a painting class taught by Darwin Musselman, I felt I’d be advancing from the old school to the new wave. Wrong. Musselman, an intense taskmaster, held me firm to the basics and taught me how to crawl first. The flying would come after I paid my dues. Musselman had studied at the Los Angeles Art Center and The School of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. Proficient in many styles of painting, he never shied away from demonstrating techniques he felt might spur a student’s progress. About the time I began to suspect he was controlling us all too tightly, he showed the class Hans Namath’s 1951 film on Jackson Pollock. I was familiar with Pollock’s work, having seen the eye-opening display about him in Life magazine a few years earlier. After watching the film, Musselman took me aside and elaborated on what he’d asked the class to look for in the film. How Pollock’s gestures of flinging paint might have been born in works he’d completed under the teaching of Thomas Hart Benton. We stood in the hush of the vacated classroom, teacher and student, picturing Pollock moving cat-like above a large canvas stretched below him. “Hundreds of paintings,” Musselman reminded me, “that stressed the lyrical abstraction of the figure against landscape.” We stood in the hush of the vacated classroom, teacher and student, picturing Pollock moving cat-like above a large canvas stretched below him. “The layers,” I said. “Really something in the way he seemed to be rushing in and out of the painting, adding layers.” “Yes,” Musselman said. “Even in the grainy film you could see how he was working with different values of paint.” “Really something,” I repeated, frustrated that I couldn’t pinpoint in words my fascination with Pollock’s wild display of energy. Musselman once more emphasized how Pollock’s fame could be traced back to years of borrowing from the academic to achieve the avant-garde. I began packing up for my next class, the image of Jackson Pollock still behind my eyes. How could I or anyone else know that on a summer evening only days away from our viewing his powerful physicality he would be killed in a car crash brought on by his heavy drinking and deep despondency? And abstract expressionism would be forever romanticized. Something Jackson Pollock might have applauded. Surely not Darwin Musselman. Decades later I still can bring the filmed image of Pollock up, his hardscrabble face, tight jeans, and denim jacket. The mixture of anger and joy in his every movement. And Musselman, a man whose encounters were almost silent compared to Pollock’s collisions—I think often of him. If the two of us could go back to that schoolroom conversation, I would bring up the part in the film where Namath had the artist work on a piece of glass above the camera. “It’s a river,” I’d tell Darwin, both of us observing the lines forming from Pollock’s gestures. “He’s dashing in and out of a river.” (Artist statement for my exhibition “Story Lines,” which opened October 2016, at 1821 Gallery & Studios.)

Creator:

Larry Hill Art (1932, American)

Creation Year:

2016

Dimensions:

Height: 30 in (76.2 cm)Width: 60 in (152.4 cm)

Medium:

Acrylic

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

2010-

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Fresno, CA

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU1823210910332

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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.