Sally Hall – Absolute Artist. Opening Thursday, November 4, 2021 5-9pm

Vermillion | November 3, 2021

Sally Hall
“Absolute Artist”
Mixed media on Plexiglas
11/4-11/27/21
Opens 11/4/21 5-9pm
co-curated by Alex Hupp

“The passion and love of painting is the meaningful pursuit of joyful creativity and happiness for pure pleasure and entertainment.” — Sally Hall

“When I asked my art teacher whether I should get a degree in art or math or something, he looked at me like I was crazy!” He said, “You’re an artist! Why would you do something like that?” “It never came up again and I never doubted what I was doing.”

Sally Hall was born in Seattle May 27, 1942, and spent her childhood in Broadmoor where she lived above the railroad tracks and could walk down to the beach every day. Her mother drove her to watercolor classes in Queen Anne and she’s considered her life to be fully immersed in and shaped by art. She successfully ran a couple of restaurants with her husbands (one was a Boeing engineer), who were all very supportive of her art: “I’ve been married three times to really, really nice human beings.” Her art career took a back seat to her family, where she cared for her husbands and raised three children. She’s always felt very lucky to have the time and a studio to create in. This show at Vermillion is the first physical art show she’s had since the late 1970s. The only other place she has been represented since is online with Saatchi Art (https://www.saatchiart.com/sallyhall).

About the art
Sally has chosen a unique and sometimes difficult medium to work with: Her paintings are done on quarter-inch Plexiglas sheets of varying sizes. Composing on these plastic sheets enables the artist to flow paint on both sides of the medium so that light and color seem to move back to front and front to back, giving the end product a vibrant quality and unusual effects of depth and movement. In some of her work she adds various fillers to her paints as she mixes them to create a painting with rough or bubbly texture. Other techniques such as using an air brush for a flat opaque quality or laminating sheets of film with solvent on front or back of the Plexiglas make this technique more flexible and unusual than the traditional paintings. The process is slow and painstaking with some paintings taking months to complete. Sally says she has learned that the only way she can be productive is to discipline herself to spending several uninterrupted hours a day painting.

She credits her professor and mentor, Monte Morrison, at the University of Puget Sound, as her main inspiration.

Her slow and painstaking process produces dynamic and vibrant qualities in her work. The energy generated by her color in some pieces is extraordinary. Other pieces, however, are more subdued and subtle. She said she strives to translate her feeling about life into her painting. She never signs her name to her work, because she finds that they may be hung in many different positions and thus give a different image for the owner. Sally invites the viewer to interact and interpret a piece with an open mind.

(Credit to Jeanne Edwards, The Everett Herald & OJ Parsons, The Spokesman Review)