Skip Hill in Solo Exhibition at Marietta, GA Avisca Fine Art Gallery Aug. 6-27, 2010

Skip Hill's first major exhibition in the Atlanta area opens on August 6, 2010 at Marietta's Avisca Fine Art Gallery. Titled "Butterfly Confessions", the exhibition includes some 30 drawing and collages created by the artist over the last 2 years. The title of the exhibition derives from the artist's particular interest in Japanese Ukiyo-e paintings and the elusive, fleeting 'floating worlds' of fantasy they depict.

Skip Hill was born in 1961 in Padre Island, TX. After dropping out of Oklahoma City University in 1981 he worked in various creative positions with the McDonald's Corporation before relocating to Southern California in 1987, doing freelance graphic design work and spending much of his time in northern Mexico. The lure of wanderlust took him to Europe, Morocco and Thailand, where he lived for a year finding work as an art director for a Bangkok business magazine, spending time at a Buddhist meditation retreat and exploring the country by motorcycle. In 1990 he settled in the Netherlands, learned Dutch and began an intensive study of Art History. Frequent visits to the great Dutch museums provided the aesthetic experience that sparked his interest in creating art for its sheer beauty and sensuous pleasure. The drawings he produced during that period were the subject of several one-man shows in the Netherlands. His return to the United States in 1992 was followed by a brief period of homelessness in Atlanta before a reunion with his estranged father in Alabama would lead to his introduction to the work of the great Black outsider artists Lonnie Holley, Jimmie Lee Sudduth and Mose Tolliver. In a highly productive and creative eighteen years since that milestone moment, Hill has studied under the Native American conceptual artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds and the abstract painter George Bogart at the University of Oklahoma. He has participated in several museum group shows and curated and created an installation for the exhibition "Casting Stones" at the Fred Jones Museum of Art. He returned to the Netherlands in 1996 to execute murals commissioned by the Groot Hontschoten Gardens Foundation and to exhibit his new work.

Divorced from any didactic or moral intent, or a social agenda, Skip Hill's iconic two-dimensional drawings of full-bodied divas, ghetto geishas, dancing bulls, crying prophets and bulky boxers project moods of epicurean delights in a mélange of sensual and sensory experience. Some of the most captivating parts of his drawings are in their peripheral details – expressive patterning, decorative and graphic lines, Asian calligraphy and African motifs. Like a shaman, Hill communicates freely between two worlds, between dream and reality, and manages to artfully coordinate his fantasy with his hand.

Skip Hill: Butterfly Confessions
August 6-August 27, 2010 (OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, August 6, 6:00-10:00 PM)
Avisca Fine Art Gallery
507 Roswell Street, Marietta, GA 30060
T: 770.977.2732
www.aviscafineart.com