American Citizen.
Marie Hull started life taking piano lessons. By age 20, she was making art with a paint brush instead. For the next 70 years, she used her talent in a most proficient way. The Mississippi Museum of Art currently is exhibiting a brilliant collection of her work. Bright Fields: The Mastery of Marie Hull is more than a bunch of pretty paintings. It’s a showcase on how we all should live our lives.
Curator and world-class pianist Bruce Levingston guided me through the exhibit yesterday. (Mississippi Public Broadcasting taped it — when it is online, I will post a link). Like a master teacher, he used Hull’s work to hammer home the lesson. First he pointed out her signature. It evolved as she grew more confident in her talent and place in the world. Then he showed me something even more powerful.
She never settled with one style. She always kept changing.
That’s so important for an artist to learn. It’s so easy to get into a rut and tempting to hang onto something that’s commercially successful. But that can come with a cost — both mentally and physically.
Hull’s career can defined in three parts: Traditional, transitional and impressionist. Early in her career, she did haunting portraits of Depression-era Mississippians. Her floral paintings from the 1950’s are stunning. She traveled widely and captured landscapes in Europe and the Middle East that will take your breath away. And as she entered the twilight of her career, she painted impressionistic paintings that just explode with colors. Bruce said Marie Hull “saw color like he heard music.” I can believe it.
Marie Hull was a storyteller. But she didn’t settle for one single way to tell her story. She experimented and changed. In her mind, experiments never failed. They just led her on a new and more exciting journeys. Journeys that took her around the world.
That’s a lesson artists — and all of us — need to remember.
Thanks to Bruce Levingston and the Mississippi Museum of Art of art for allowing Marie Hull to teach me with a such beautiful exhibit.