Former painter for the city, Helena Hill-Wilson, exhibits at InWent

Transparency, openness, change and motion

She is religious and loves nature, is without subterfuge or intellectual wrappings. This is how Steven Wilkinson introduced the artist H, who lives in Pöcking, at the opening of her second personal exhibition on the premises of  InWent in Feldafing.
Since 2002 the highly talented painter is known to the people in the district for her expressive style and the outstanding mastery of her craft.
It was in 2002 that she was nominated painter of the city and moved into the Paul-Thieme studio.

It is first and foremost in her beach paintings that the expressiveness and mastery of her craft becomes evident. These paintings depict a family idyll on the seaside. Children are sitting on the beach in the midst of a mountain of toys. In the second painting entitled ‘Two minutes later’ the children have lost their interest in these toys because nature proves to be far more attractive than the plastic offerings of their parents. The children are digging in the sand with their bare hands. This process of the dissolution of human influence is artfully rendered through the use of light reflexes. Similar to the work of impressionist painters the artist seems to create her pictures from a collage of light. With a sensitive, finely honed feeling for colour she dissolves the contours of her figures but at the same time lends them a quality of brilliance and clarity, as if they were shining from within. Everything seems to be fluid, in motion, the air seems to vibrate.

These are her themes: transparency, openness, change, movement.  This is true for both her portraits and her atmospheric landscapes. Her cycle ‘The four seasons’ is the focal point of the exhibit. It consists of four large tableaux. Each of them is a collage of 28 individual pictures pieced together like a puzzle. They are perceptions/snippets/parts/sections of landscapes that can be arranged and re-arranged in a playful manner in a million possible variations.
Each of those individual paintings that remind us of miniature Japanese brush paintings is part of the larger context of creation. With her holistic approach, HHW combines poetry, music and painting to form an artistic whole. In a power point presentation the artist shared her approach to art with the public. During the presentation poems were read to a background of music by the British composer Sir Michael Tippett. A moment of contemplation and lingering concentration.