Galleries : Ms. Hull's double vision
The walls of the Hermine Merel Smith Fine Art gallery, which is set in a woodsy glade across the street from the West Tisbury fire station, where her husband volunteers, are filled with Hermine Hull's landscapes, still lifes, interiors, and figure paintings. Occasionally, woodcut artist Ruth Kirchmeier shares space with her friend in the gallery that still carries Ms. Hull's maiden name.
Keeping busy: Gallery owner, artist, and The Times West Tisbury town columnist, Hermine Hull. Photos by Ralph Stewart
"Representing myself feels totally different," says Ms. Hull, who for 22 years has made her living exclusively as an art dealer, using her eye and her expertise as a proven painter to sell the work of other artists.
This summer Ms. Hull celebrates her fifth year in the business of representing herself in the established West Tisbury gallery that has featured work by as many as 20 different artists. "I had to promote their work," she says. "My whole raison d'etre was them. There's a real temptation when it's your own work and your own studio not to promote yourself."
Making decisions about pricing and arranging other artist's paintings seemed so simple. She finds it harder to set prices for herself, especially because she's never shown anywhere else. "I don't believe art should be so expensive people can't afford it," she says. "I don't like it when galleries are intimidating."
"The Dinner Party," a recent painting by Ms. Hull.
Ms. Hull still remembers what it was like to hang her first show. "I walked into the gallery, and I looked at this record of my world for the past year. It was a wonderful feeling," she says. "There's nothing like it. It's humbling."
Now Ms. Hull must produce an entire gallery full of work each season. That doesn't faze her. "Work begets work," she says. "The more you paint, the more ideas you get."
At first, Ms. Hull painted landscapes exclusively. In art school, she had concentrated on interiors and figures, so landscapes were a new frontier, helping her relearn the basics of color and form.
"I had a knack for it," she says. "It's gratifying. A small landscape is salable. There's no two ways about it." But moving past that wasn't an issue.
Ms. Hull's work has steadily evolved to become more personal: "You really are looking at your world and how you have translated the world around you," she says. "My work is a real diary of my life."
Ms. Hull frequently goes out to paint with friend and fellow artist Leslie Baker, whom she admires for her unerring sense of the proportion and balance. The two artists plan to exhibit their onsite sketches alongside the larger studio paintings that result.
Her first big challenge in painting landscapes was teaching herself to focus and simplify the way she would work with a figure. It was engaging to explore the abstract concepts she found underlying the natural world. "I really consider myself an abstract painter. With landscapes you're looking at what's there."
With bigger paintings came another set of issues to explore. "It takes a whole other vision," Ms. Hull says. "There's something exciting about it because the perimeters - and parameters - are so much larger."
One of her favorite painters is American abstract artist Richard Diebenkorn. Ms. Hull remembers seeing a retrospective of his paintings at New York's Whitney Museum that included representational and abstract work.
"To me, they're exactly the same," Ms. Hull says. "He's looking at space and making abstractions. The subject is irrelevant. You're always trying to figure it out. That's much more interesting than just rendering."
On the other hand, Ms. Hull also likes the idea of painting the world around her. "The subject is just the excuse for the painting, but I don't know where else you'd start. It's a balancing act."
Ms. Hull's still lifes came from the down time involved in managing an up-Island gallery. She began to bring home a bouquet of flowers or an assortment of vegetables from the West Tisbury Farmer's Market.
"I can remember when I thought still lifes were the most boring subject for a painting," she says, laughing. "Now I love doing them. Go figure."
Like many gallery owners, Ms. Hull worries about the downturn of the economy. But she was heartened by New York Times interviews with artists who said the poor economic climate actually freed them to do more of what they wanted. Her response has been to go off on less commercial tangents.
"It's all the abstract stuff that interests me," Ms. Hull says. "When I'm alone in my studio all day, that's what sustains me, the edges, the brushwork, the colors, the design.
Over the past winter, she became increasingly interested in process. "I'm leaving more of the process in my paintings," she says. "Frequently it's a correction. I might have to fix the relationship between the shoulder and the arm of a figure. I like the sense of journey being there in the painting."
Of "The Dinner Party," a large recent painting, Ms. Hull explains, "There's quite a lot of the effort in evidence. I had ample opportunity for reconsideration, and I was quite pleased."
"I also like talking with people, telling them things like where the idea came from." Ms. Hull adds, "It keeps me from being too obsessive."
Hermine Merel Smith Fine Art Gallery, 548 Edgartown-West Tisbury Rd., West Tisbury. Open daily, 11 am-5 pm. 508-693-7719.
