Long-time Oregon artist and X Gallery champion Bonnie Hull has an upcoming exhibition at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon from August 19–October 15, 2020. The show, “Memory as Myth,” is a collection of her paintings, drawings, and quilts, each of which are extensions of her distinct lexicon of imagery and narrative expression. The exhibition features new work created specifically for the exhibition as well as a variety of other work spanning her life as an artist and includes a selection of her drawing books from over the years.

As her blog states, “Bonnie Hull is a painter. Transplanted from the urban mid-west, she works in Oregon’s capital city living in a mid-19th century house. Studio, garden, quilting, coffee, preservation, the Oregon art world are among her topics.” She has been making drawings, paintings, and quilts in Salem for 50 years with those topics as her integral focus. Hull’s work includes a variety of media that mimic her diaristic approach to art making. Fundamental to her practice is drawing. She uses this medium to explicate so many of the meanings of the word “draw:” to bring forth; to bring along with; to select as in drawing turns from a hat; to take in as a breath. This fertile practice includes daily drawings that literally draw out the pleasures, sorrows, humor, and worries of life.

During the COVID-19 shutdowns, the drawings (the Corona Series) tell of the progress of spring, conversations with friends occurring over video, the adventures of children and grandchildren far away. Most drawings have a red spot that for her represents the virus. Twelve of these drawings will be included in “Memory as Myth” and are examples of the process-based documentation of life that recurs vividly in her work. A snapshot of how all of her work originates in highly personal moments in time—whether the moment is a found object, a book she’s reading, or an exchange with a friend or loved one.

Hull’s studio work also includes paintings and quilts that both encapsulate and expand on elements of her drawings and the bountiful collections of objects that fill her home and studio. These mediums do not function in a hierarchy with her drawings, they are amplifications or magnifications of them, using a different motion to express her ideas. Clear references to Fay Jones and Maira Kalman can be found in Hull’s work, as can echoes of American artist Joseph Cornell who also claimed the vocabulary of interior narrative using the idea of memento and found object as inspiration. Her quilted pieces nod to both the narrative “story quilts” of Faith Ringgold and more abstract fabric work of Miriam Schapiro and Rosie Lee Tompkins.

In the exhibit “Little Me” at the Minthorne Gallery at George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon in the summer of 2019, the deft curation of recent paintings and quilts was “defined by memory and image” revealing the core of her practice—narrative, pattern, texture, the drawn line. In this show these elements focused on “the very way memories occur: a major memory leads to smaller incidental memories and glimpses of a memory, maybe, a fleeting image.” The new exhibit at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, “Memory as Myth” is comprised of new paintings and drawings which continue both the diaristic narrative and the emphasis on pattern and texture as memories are reinterpreted visually. Additionally, on view will be one quilt, a selection of earlier work on paper, and many of her drawing books, the source of most realized pieces.

A self-proclaimed painter, preservationist, gardener and quilter, Hull has twice been artist-in-residence at Bush Barn Art Center in Salem, has several ongoing collaborative relationships with local artists as well as a life-long one with Carolyn Schneider who lives in California. Hull maintains a studio at the artist collective Studios at the Mill at the Willamette Heritage Center, and in 2016 ran the Compass Gallery at the Heritage Center with artists Dayna Collins and Tory Brokenshire. She shows her work throughout the region. X Gallery is pleased to host some of her available work, contact us if you are interested in a piece.