Hull’s paintings portray beauty of rural life
John Hull’s paintings reflect rural blue-collar lives: children at the baseball field, a junk-yard dog and some regular folk milling around the salvage yard. His earthy portrayals of people and his mastery of color and tone earned him the Thomas Benedict Clarke prize at the 179th annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design in New York, the oldest and most prestigious award for painting in the United States. Hull, Professor of Painting and drawing, recieved Westword’s Best of 2005 in the area of realistic painting for an exhibition of painting at Plus Gallery in Denver. He is the recipient of the College of Arts & Media’s Excellence in Research and Creative Activities honor in 2006. “One look at his dossier supports the fact that Professor Hull is a painter of excellence and highly regarded as one of the finest painters of his genre throughout the country,” writes CAM Interim Dean Kathy Maes.
Between 2003 and 2005, Hull participated in 22 exhibitions, six of which were solo exhibitions, with 16 group shows. During this period he had six at museums exhibitions including the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, N.Y., the Museums of Contemporary Art in Boulder, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, and the Art Museum of Missoula.
Hull created 40 illustrations for Rider of a Pale Horse, a book on the history of the atom bomb project written by his father, McAllister Hull and was published in 2005 by the University of New Mexico Press. The illustrations are now housed in the Los Alamos Musuem.
In the past two years Hull has given public lectures at the Denver Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Wyoming, Goucher College and Louisiana Tech University.
In 2006, Hull created a series of baseball paintings which were exhibited in a solo show at the Wichita Museum of Art.
“He is, and always has been, one of our most highly regarded and productive creative researcher-artists in the College of Arts & Media,” Maes says.