Art Gallery

You are at Keith Hill's Art Gallery. Click on one of the buttons indicating the type of painting and its opus number on the left to view the individual paintings.

My paintings explore how how the brain perceives the world visually. That is why I call my work "Perceptionist" rather than impressionist, the style they appear to imitate. My paintings are made more for the brain than for the eye. This attitude comes from having made more than 385 harpsichords, clavichords, fortepianos, and violins over the last 33 years, instruments consciously constructed to appeal to our perceptual factulties, especially our perception of our sense of hearing. Perceptionist art is not interested in the surface of things, only the deeper significance of what the surface implies. When those deeper matters are rightly understood, the work should (theoretically) reflect that understanding by being compellingly interesting without being offensive...too often a ploy used today to get people's attention.

In my view, the work is more important than the artist. This attitude is both weird and rare. When the artist is more important than the work, then originality becomes a burden and a requirement. Unfortunately, originality is neither as enduringly compelling nor as meaningful as quality. The pursuit of originality leads to a narrow, thinly defined expressive language. Art always suffers from it. On the otherhand, when the work exhibits quality of a highly complex and dimensional nature, it compells the attention just as nature compells our attention. It is the nature of nature to produce work that is unique. That uniqueness stems from complex of principles which result in every natural expression being of exceedingly high quality, which guarantees uniqueness. Originality in nature is almost nonexistant. This is why all the greatest artists focused on quality rather than on originality.

Without an understanding of how relationships create meaning, even the most competent work is mediocre. In the case of painting, those relationships are visual. I don't claim to understand how to create meaning through the expressive medium of paint on a canvas. That is the reason I paint...to discover how to do that. Every painting is an experiment to learn more about the nature of that complex of principles and how minor changes to a work, in progress, can alter the feeling which the viewer experiences from the perceiving of the work.

Click here for a Sound Sample*

Artists ought not to work in a vacuum of information about how their work is being received by observers.I would invite you to write me with your feedback on the work at my email address below. Thank You and I hope you get pleasure from seeing the work. Naturally, if you like my work and wish to buy any of the pictures, write me and ask.

If you are interested to visit some of my other sites to view my other work and read some of the things I have written, click on one of the 6 buttons just below the "About the Artist" button at the top on the left of the screen.

*(Here's a trick to hear the sound sample and view the site at the same time. 1.Click on the sound sample to download it. 2.Then, download one of my other sites on your browser, in effect, opening a new window. 3.Click on the SITE button, at that site, relating to this site. 4. Once you have this site accessed from the new page and window, you can to view the site and listen to the downloading sound sample for it.)