Daphne Hill and Anna Stump have been a collaborating artistic partnership since 2010. The pair work seamlessly on each painting they produce, passing each piece back and forth, challenging and complementing each other in the process. After creating with layers of resin for over a decade from their base in San Diego, the team is now exploring enamel on metal panels, inspired by the California deserts and outdoor living. Hill&Stump considers their current work to be in the tradition of the Pattern and Decoration Movement, guided by artists including Miriam Schapiro, Joyce Kozloff and Kim MacConnel, with additional influences from the comtemporary street art scene.
Hill&Stump work together in their studios in the Coachella Valley and Morongo Basin. Ms. Hill earned her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Ms. Stump, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, earned her MFA at San Diego State University. Both artists are also professors, and have taught studio art courses at multiple colleges and universities for many years.
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Hill&Stump work together in their studios in the Coachella Valley and Morongo Basin. Ms. Hill earned her MFA from Claremont Graduate University. Ms. Stump, a Senior Fulbright Scholar, earned her MFA at San Diego State University. Both artists are also professors, and have taught studio art courses at multiple colleges and universities for many years.
- These paintings are enamel on metal and have a consistent magic in their delivery of colorful botany. They feature mystical passages of abstract shapes adding up to something we almost recognize.
- But the signature motif of a Hill&Stump painting is that these artists PAINT, which of course sounds obvious. But in our contemporary scene, so much of what we look at is soulessly rendered.
- Every Hill&Stump picture ... privileges paint. Paint gets noticed when it is gooped on, facture-heavy or self-consciously brushstrokey. It takes a special touch, and that touch is on display here, for pictures to avoid those tropes yet nonetheless assert themselves as paint-forward. There is no illustration here, there is merely paint forming a familiar reckoning, and yet, that alchemy of possibilities causes one to see palm trees and blossoms as firework explosions, to see branches as unrequited outreach, to see thorns as rungs on ladders of endless visual exploration.
- If paint were frosting these pictures would be a delectable buffet of flavor, but better yet, the show was a substantial meal of what an artist--or a dynamic duo--can do when, with a mastery of their medium, they go all the way. The desert sun is bright, and these paintings retain that brilliance; they magnify it across the color spectrum and tickle it with whispers of what we have encountered in nature. But they immortalize it in the synthetic to ensure there is nothing else like them on earth--a Hill&Stump is its own vision--lights, camera, action!
- Daphne Hill and Anna Stump are visual novelists, with their own stories to tell through the art they create. Working together as Hill&Stump, they produce not novels but poetry, in the form of floral portraiture.
- Hill and Stump florals are best seen as symbolist poems, evoking flowers through patterns of color, and (more subtly) the glass of a vase through the surface gloss of resin.
- Gloss is unexpected here – it's normally the property of a new sedan or surfboard, and their perfect even color. To pair gloss with expressive brushstrokes marks the genius of Hill&Stump in remaking a classic genre.
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