In a lecture last Thursday in Carpenter Hall, artist, sculptor and print-maker Clinton Hill spoke about his art exhibit, "Spatial Constructions," now featured in the Hopkins Center.
Placing the works currently on exhibit in a clear context, Hill discussed the development of his art, as it has moved from fiberglass to colored pulp to the most recent wooden constructions. The art pieces in the Jaffe-Friede and Strauss Galleries explore the tension between two- and three-dimensionality, the importance of color and the transformation of common objects into pieces of art.
In his address, Hill revealed the method he employs in creating his artwork. He created his first wooden constructions while working on the color-pulp paper. This technique consisted of mixing color together with the pulp in the process of making paper. In the color-pulp paper Hill explored abstract, decorative lines and their movement across colored planes.
Most of these works are collages, and while working on the collages with paper, Hill started to experiment with other materials. Thus, a new series appears, which combines color-pulped paper with branches or other wooden forms.
Hill explored these heterogeneous collages further, translating them entirely into wooden constructions. Soon thereafter, in his work in the new media, Hill developed a distinctive approach. The planar, tense, pulsating line of the color-pulp paper gives way to solid, bulky geometric wooden figures: semicircles, rolls and sticks.
These wooden constructions hold in themselves the tension between the planar and the sculptural. The more solid pieces are physical and threedimensional. They are arranged in a flat, planar manner, denying physical three dimensional space. Yet, wires, gaudy yellow wooden rings and triangles combat the two dimensionality: sticking, projecting and rotating. Thus, the ambiguity of planar and sculptural is resolved and regenerated at the same time.
Along with the dynamics of the two and three dimensionality, Hill explores color combinations, including intense greens, reds, pinks, yellows, greys and purples. The flamboyant colors arrest the eye, and the hues become the focal point of the composition, its meaning and its essence. In the works "Green Enclosed," "Enclosed Ochre," "Little pink," "Four Greys" and "Red Down," the color combination acts as the subject, the harmony, the tension and the fight among colors.
In Hill's wooden constructions color is a solid. It has a rough texture. Color does not simply cover the wooden pieces as a film; rather, it interacts with the shape and changes the outlines of the form. Saturated colors are mixed with unpure tones, creating a sense of transformation. Thus, through the transition in color, the wooden construction itself changes appearances.
The combination of color and form works toward the abstract; the compositions imply living forms as in "Grasshopper" and "Red Wing." However, these abstractions are not preconceived. Hill does not sculpt by reducing the complexity of lines to reach the essence, the soul of the form. The abstraction is rather consequential; he first creates the construction and then he sees in it the reminder, the ghost, of the real form.
Hill's constructions provoke many questions, including those about the meaning of the art, the concept beyond the form and the feelings that are expressed. As Stephens Westfall wrote in an opening essay to Hill's exhibit in Marilyn Pearl Gallery in March, 1988: "It is impossible to approach Clinton Hill's work symbolically; it 'stands' for nothing. Instead, things and ideas stand forth in it, often in a multitude, the conjunction of which might reasonably be termed the 'subject.'"
Thus, we should encounter these works without analyzing them, see them without penetrating them. For everything is there projecting out towards us. Nothing stays behind and nothing remains beyond.
