I just read this article on LDS.org and thought of my friend Talya. It is such a good article and gives you a lot to think about. I am grateful for my friend Talya who has served my family and so many others through her art. I have gained a deeper testimony through her art. I have understood more deeply though her art. Thank you Talya Johnson for your service and sharing your work with us.
Bill L. Hill: Painter of Light
Bill
L. Hill is an artist with strong feelings about color and light. He
believes that color is a channel through which truth can flow with great
efficiency. “Color,” he explains, “is one of the most pure channels of
communication because it is a direct derivative of light.”
Visual
art deals with light more directly than the other arts do. And an
inspired artist can use color to communicate truths that cannot be
communicated by music, writing, or any other art. But all the arts
complement each other, Brother Hill continues. Each has its own means of
touching us.
Along
with painting, Bill is an accomplished musician. Having studied and
listened to music—its chords, patterns, and harmonics—he has developed
his own theory of color. Bill is convinced that just as music creates
its effects on us when tones and chords are arranged in certain
families, groupings, and ranges, so do certain combinations of color as
they are used together in a work.
Even
though this principle is not revolutionary, Brother Hill began to
realize its spiritual implications for himself as an artist. He adds, “I
want to communicate the messages of light, beauty, and excellence that
are part of the Light of
Christ, but first I have to have a measure of these in me. You can’t give something you don’t have.” (See
D&C 50:24 and
D&C 88:67.)
A
colorful individual himself with a white, well-trimmed beard, white
wavy hair, and gray-blue eyes, Brother Hill has trained himself to
distinguish colors where others generally do not. He believes that we
can see subtle colors better in our peripheral vision—colors which, if
focused upon, disappear.
“I
had to learn to control the use of my eyes to really see what was there
before I destroyed it by focusing sharply. This occurred to me one day
when I was driving in the southern Utah desert. Flashes of color,
evident out of the corner of my eye, vanished when I looked directly at
them,” he said. “All atmospheric matter, such as dust and moisture
particles, acts as microscopic prisms splintering the sunlight into its
rainbow parts, creating an environment of all colors everywhere
present.”
Beyond
his selection of intense color, Bill uses a deliberate technique of
“layering” his canvas—successive applications of transparent treatment
with “all colors everywhere present.” He says that this procedure allows
the light to penetrate the work, glance from various tinted facets, and
ricochet outward as live energy—somewhat as light plays in a fire-opal
or diamond.
Brother
Hill didn’t start painting full-time until he was forty-five years old.
Now sixty-seven, he works in his thirty-foot-by-forty-foot studio
located behind his home in Mendon, Utah, at the foot of the Wellsville
Mountains in Cache Valley. He is the high priests group instructor in
his ward, and his wife, Carolyn, and he are temple specialists in their
stake.
Light
is one of God’s gifts to us, he declares, and it is most appropriately
used when turned back to its source in devoted service. (See
D&C 88:50.)
Bill’s painting is his devoted service and his passion. He sees himself
as a receptacle through which light and inspiration flow—an apprentice
studying under the Master Artist.
