May Hillhouse: Spirit of freedom - SOLD
May Hillhouse
Spirit of Freedom – ca. 1967
Oil on canvas
93 x 61,5 cm
Signed bottom right
Sold - 2009
Born Mary Ellen Hillhouse, 1908, Strand, Cape Province
Died 1989
Rykie van Reenen wrote: The work of May Hillhouse always remains the expression of a personal and often tempestuous emotion or experience, translated in its various shades and nuances by a constant interplay of planes and tension.
Although Hillhouse worked as a commercial artist for many years after her art training at the Natal Tech Art School, it was her studies with Martin Bloch in London in 1938 that had a profound influence on her approach to painting and her development as an artist. Bloch conducted research in ‘colour-science’, and Hillhouse studied the scientific analysis of the effects related to the mixing and juxtaposition of colours, working in his studio for nine months.
Hillhouse’s early work was of an illustrative and figurative nature, and showed signs of her inclination towards abstraction with her compositions having an underlying emphasis on form and colour; moving away from the representational. Her mature style is marked by its freely painted abstract planes of colour, and the effects of an unexpected juxtaposing of seemingly irreconcilable colour variations. Although the structural form of her abstract compositions is strong, she successfully manages the subtle integration of figurative elements, accented by her rhythmical, spontaneous drawing with the brush.
Bibliography:
Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa, Cape Town, 1996, pp 215 to 217
Rykie van Reenen, Our Art 2, Pretoria, 1961, pp 61 and 62