Gallery 2112 proudly presents Modalities, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Bill Hill, who is known for his exploratory approach to color and representation that reaches back to his study and friendship with Washington Color School artists Sam Gilliam, Leon Berkowitz, Simon Governeur, and Gene Davis.

The new paintings began as improvisation, and each painting grew more structured as Hill’s thinking about the work intensified. His influences are vast and various: the music of John Cage, Ornette Coleman’s live albums (in tribute to Gilliam, an ardent fan), Finnegan’s Wake, mist and sunlight, how ancient stories resurface. “The associations build,” Hill says, while maintaining that the work is open for each viewer’s experience, with space for impressions to flutter, converse, and coalesce.

Hill grew up working in tobacco fields in Charles County, Maryland, and his paintings are strongly influenced by the land and the culture. Agricultural cycles, the red-violet earth, and his sense of his fellow workers who followed the region’s harvests fed Hill’s understanding that color is a vehicle for history, stories, and radiant thought. Charles County is also where Hill met the work of James Joyce, whose convention-defiant writing would become his lifelong companion. Upon reading the first three chapters of Ulysses, Hill was “hooked forever. This guy is a magician. He sees the connections,” he says.

Bill Hill was born in Washington, DC, and moved to the rural splendor of southern Maryland in grade school. He studied painting with Douglas Wilson at Carnegie Mellon, and then returned to DC where he furthered his study of color with Gilliam, Berkowitz, and other legends.