RICHARD HULL
2015-05-11Hull’s crayon drawings, in particular, are portraits in the form of hairdos, each one expressing a distinct visual personality rather than a representation of a particular individual. This quasi-figurative direction started with, of all things, drawing a horse’s tail for an exquisite corpse in a performative collaboration with MacArthur award-winning saxophonist and composer Ken Vandermark and the illustrator and printmaker Dan Grzeca. Hull has also been influenced by the concept of a Klein bottle, a non-orientable surface with no identifiable “inner” and “outer” side. In subsequent works, he has doubled and mirrored the tail/kidney shape, while exploring spatial relationships, both metaphorically and formally, between the geometric dualities of full and empty spaces. In Hull’s stolen portraits, horse tails now resemble looping flower petal forms – building blocks for portrait-like structures. The bulbous loops are accentuated by minute, repetitive, often concentric actions within the large masses.
The common crayons Hull uses for this body of work give each drawing a visceral, physical presence that is also transparent and ephemeral, and the heavy build up of wax allows for sgraffito, a scratch-like mark-making technique, to be applied to the various layers of color. Given that he thinks of the drawings as hairdos, it is not surprising to learn that he sometimes uses a comb to make the marks. The crayon drawings have been the primary focus of his studio work the past two years but they are not studies for paintings; Hull stated in a recent interview on Inside/Within: “I did the paintings before I did the drawings. The paintings lead me to the drawings.” The rigorous crayon drawings are distillations of the ideas achieved through Hull’s investigation of the more fluid, sensual materials associated with oil painting.
Opposite – #9, 2014
Exhibition runs through to June 13th, 2015
Western Exhibitions
845 W Washington Blvd.
2nd Floor
Chicago, IL 60607
