About the Artist Eric Hall
Liverpool Town Hall via Wikimedia Commons
At 15, it was time for me to leave school and contribute to the household, I got an interview at Lee & Nightingale Advertising in downtown Liverpool, but the manager wanted me to prove my meager portfolio. "Go out and draw the Town Hall," he said. "Come back in an hour." I did and landed my first job.
For the next 50 years as an Art Director, I earned my share of awards, both gold and silver and stellar readership awards. As a freelancer, I completed commissioned works for National Geographic Magazine. I also exhibited and sold fine art, primarily in a representational style at juried shows throughout the Philadelphia region, including PAFA, the Philadelphia Sketch Club and the Woodmere Art Museum. One of my paintings, a large triptych called Expressway, is in the Pennsylvania Convention Center Art Collection.
An Abstract Painter Emerges
But while I talked to clients on the phone, another side of my brain was unconsciously at work, scribbling elaborate doodles on the smallest Post-it® Notes, Tiny abstract sketches would evolve spontaneously over several days, as I added scribbles and random shapes in vivid colors with every conversation. Eventually, a miniature collection of Post-it art studded the walls and work surfaces of my studio.
This tiny doodle inspired "Collimation No. 2" -- a 54" x 42" oil painting.
When I retired from the ad world, I wanted to do something completely different as a painter, so I let my imagination loose on a much larger canvas. Some of those little doodles became 8-foot paintings. I called those new paintings "Collimations", because they came from a parallel creative process – abstraction versus realism.
At the first Solo Exhibition of this new work, the late art critic, Edward J. Sozanski, wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Hall... brings together shaggy blocks of resolutely flat, intensely saturated color to produce reactions in which radiance and vibrancy are internally generated... his work lights up the gallery like a beacon.”
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The 5 basic elements of shape: the sphere, the cube, the pyramid, the cone and the cylinder.
As I followed my imagination with new Collimations, I rediscovered the basic geometry of art, those 5 shapes that give dimension to all forms: the sphere, the cube, the pyramid, the cone and the cylinder. Of these, I found the multifaceted, multidimensional planes of the pyramid most appealing. Its shape lets me explore perspective and light in unusual and unexpected ways, to escape the confines of a two-dimensional canvas. What the pyramid really gives me is a place to hang my color. I've continued to explore this simple shape through over 30 paintings and I'm still delighted at its potential.
Artist Statement
I have recently been inspired to revisit realism and I think my new work is freer and fresher because of my artistic journey. I make no apologies for not confining myself to a single genre. I paint abstracts and realistic art as the mood strikes me. At ninety-plus years old, I still seek ways to say more.
My journey as an artist starts in a rough corner of Liverpool during the great Depression and the bombings of World War II. It winds across the Atlantic and through an award-winning career as an Advertising Art Director in the midst of the Mad Men era and later as an Illustrator. It wasn't until I retired in Philadelphia that I turned to painting full time. And that journey continues even today, as I work through my nineties.
I had no formal art education to speak of, yet I was always making art – whether drawing two tanks fighting for school chums or painting plaster casts of ducks and crucifixes that my mother sold to local gift shops.
I had no formal art education to speak of, yet I was always making art – whether drawing two tanks fighting for school chums or painting plaster casts of ducks and crucifixes that my mother sold to local gift shops.
Liverpool Town Hall via Wikimedia Commons
At 15, it was time for me to leave school and contribute to the household, I got an interview at Lee & Nightingale Advertising in downtown Liverpool, but the manager wanted me to prove my meager portfolio. "Go out and draw the Town Hall," he said. "Come back in an hour." I did and landed my first job.
For the next 50 years as an Art Director, I earned my share of awards, both gold and silver and stellar readership awards. As a freelancer, I completed commissioned works for National Geographic Magazine. I also exhibited and sold fine art, primarily in a representational style at juried shows throughout the Philadelphia region, including PAFA, the Philadelphia Sketch Club and the Woodmere Art Museum. One of my paintings, a large triptych called Expressway, is in the Pennsylvania Convention Center Art Collection.
An Abstract Painter Emerges
But while I talked to clients on the phone, another side of my brain was unconsciously at work, scribbling elaborate doodles on the smallest Post-it® Notes, Tiny abstract sketches would evolve spontaneously over several days, as I added scribbles and random shapes in vivid colors with every conversation. Eventually, a miniature collection of Post-it art studded the walls and work surfaces of my studio.
This tiny doodle inspired "Collimation No. 2" -- a 54" x 42" oil painting.
When I retired from the ad world, I wanted to do something completely different as a painter, so I let my imagination loose on a much larger canvas. Some of those little doodles became 8-foot paintings. I called those new paintings "Collimations", because they came from a parallel creative process – abstraction versus realism.
At the first Solo Exhibition of this new work, the late art critic, Edward J. Sozanski, wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “Hall... brings together shaggy blocks of resolutely flat, intensely saturated color to produce reactions in which radiance and vibrancy are internally generated... his work lights up the gallery like a beacon.”
The 5 basic elements of shape: the sphere, the cube, the pyramid, the cone and the cylinder.
As I followed my imagination with new Collimations, I rediscovered the basic geometry of art, those 5 shapes that give dimension to all forms: the sphere, the cube, the pyramid, the cone and the cylinder. Of these, I found the multifaceted, multidimensional planes of the pyramid most appealing. Its shape lets me explore perspective and light in unusual and unexpected ways, to escape the confines of a two-dimensional canvas. What the pyramid really gives me is a place to hang my color. I've continued to explore this simple shape through over 30 paintings and I'm still delighted at its potential.
Artist Statement
I have recently been inspired to revisit realism and I think my new work is freer and fresher because of my artistic journey. I make no apologies for not confining myself to a single genre. I paint abstracts and realistic art as the mood strikes me. At ninety-plus years old, I still seek ways to say more.