The universal truth is that there are many more artists than there is gallery wall space for them all. Some artists are defeated by this fact. Others make their art and find solutions. Hill & Stump are artists Daphne Hill and Anna Stump. They are not waiting for the fairy godmother of gallerists to wave the exhibition wand. They are looking anywhere to exhibit their two-person paintings.
Where is a place that has ample blank wall space with good foot traffic?
Hill & Stump join a list of artists who have discovered an audience at the movies, specifically the Laemmle theaters. I’ve seen a thousand or more art exhibits and I must say, it works. The paintings are hung respectfully and lit just as nice as if they were hanging at Blum and Poe (shoutout to the dearly departed). Viewers from all walks of life get to see contemporary art and the artists expand their audience. And so there is no reason not to treat this exhibit as a legitimate exhibition of contemporary art.
Daphne and Anna collaborate on each artwork in a process that curator Tish Laemmle observes as seamless. Their paintings have no evidence of one of them dominating in any specific area. The subject of their show at the Santa Monica Royal theater was the flora and fauna of the desert, the place where, like many creative Southern Californians, both artists have relocated in the past decade. These paintings are enamel on metal and have a consistent magic in their delivery of colorful botany. They feature mystical passages of abstract shapes adding up to something we almost recognize.
But the signature motif of a Hill & Stump painting is that these artists PAINT, which of course sounds obvious. But in our contemporary scene, so much of what we look at is soulessly rendered. Art today, everywhere, is dependent on a substructure of obvious lines. The magical alchemy of paint, the paradoxical substance that is liquid yet lives forever dried, so often these days is just added on to some empty image, a perfunctory afterthought, a paint by numbers, a fill in the blank.
Not so with Hill & Stump. Every picture in the show at the Royal privileges paint. Paint gets noticed when it is gooped on, facture-heavy or self-consciously brushstrokey. It takes a special touch, and that touch is on display here, for pictures to avoid those tropes yet nonetheless assert themselves as paint-forward. There is no illustration here, there is merely paint forming a familiar reckoning, and yet, that alchemy of possibilities causes one to see palm trees and blossoms as firework explosions, to see branches as unrequited outreach, to see thorns as rungs on ladders of endless visual exploration.
If paint were frosting these pictures would be a delectable buffet of flavor, but better yet, the show was a substantial meal of what an artist – or a dynamic duo – can do when, with a mastery of their medium, they go all the way. The desert sun is bright, and these paintings retain that brilliance; they magnify it across the color spectrum and tickle it with whispers of what we have encountered in nature. But they immortalize it in the synthetic to ensure there is nothing else like them on earth – a Hill & Stump is its own vision – lights, camera, action!
