uring the World Series, those without sport-team fanaticism start to wonder where these FREAKS meet with everyday reality. Dave Hall has decided to breed his favorite worlds together. Hall has been painting professionally for the last four years. He also really likes to play squash.

“Four Generations of American Painting,” a retrospective of his family’s heritage on canvas, will be shown for the first time Oct. 17 and 18 at Squashworks before the show moves to 15th Street Gallery on Oct. 23. A few of the paintings will even grace the squash courts. "They are two things I really like," Hall said.

The show will include works by his father, Vernon Hall, grandmother, Ester Bailey Hall, and great-great-grandfather, Thomas H. Snow.

Vernon's birthday on Oct. 16 was the catalyst for the show.

Vernon has been painting professionally for 30 years. He has a large body of work, from landscapes to portraits to rural architecture. He is an engineer by trade and his draftsman abilities merge into his photorealist work. Unlike the others, Vernon gets his kicks from acrylic paint, but manages a masterful replication of his surroundings.

Even though Dave comes from a long line of painters and has been around the visual medium his whole life, he only recently started his painting career. As soon as he picked up his brush, he couldn’t put it down. Four years ago he decided to take his first art class from Wayne Geary.

Locally renowned artist Connie Borup is one of his favorite mentors. Lucky for him, her studio is right across the way from his own. She was his second art teacher outside of his family and there is a definite compositional, rolling-mist comparison to be made. As landscape painters, both artists relish in the simplicity of empty spaces. Borup’s sensitive emotive lines bend with trees, giving a dancer-like quality in a realist precise style. She, like Dave, evokes time and place like dream memory.

Dave leans toward his inspiration and paints with brushstrokes like the impressionists. A specific site never appears like it is portrayed, but is actually more honestly painted—as it was meant to be seen. Borup’s show at Phillips Gallery is also opening on the Oct. 17.
Dave’s first gallery show was at the new library in Rowland Hall St. Mark’s school, where he sold 16 of 20 of his original works. He has since quit teaching physics at Rowland Hall’s middle school to pursue painting full-time. His wife and children are supportive and excited.

“I don’t know that physics really helped me as an artist,” Dave said “I suspect that it did.”

Ester Bailey Hall possibly has the largest breadth in media. She has painted theorems, oil stencils on white velvet, glass paintings (an art of laying down the highlights first and painting in reverse so the image shows through the glass), watercolors and oil on canvas. Whatever she painted was touched up with highly saturated color and it pulsates a vibrant fullness.

The eldest painter on display, Thomas H. Snow, was a traveler. He would paint scenes and portraits of the New England area. There could be a critical analysis applied to subject matter he utilized as a 19th-century man. Though his subjects have a tender quality, historical painting leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

The show is a collective repertoire that allows viewers to trace the young lineage of American painting. Consider the emphasis a family line that deviates from—yet is linked by—a rushing river of paint. The color palettes, subject matter and brush movements are distinguished by the artist’s character and era, but the thick smell of oil paint runs in the family.
stephanie@red-mag.com