Jill Hoy Is a Contemporary Impressionist Painter in Maine

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me in the studio artist Jill Hoy. Thank you for coming in today.

Jill Hoy: My pleasure, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: Jill, you and I have actually known each other quite some time now. Maybe about ten-ish years?

Jill Hoy: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: Sort of different iterations of each of our lives, I think.

Jill Hoy: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: So I'm wondering, as we're kind of in this new phase of your life, what are some of the things that you've been thinking about with regard to your art?

Jill Hoy: Well, my late husband died in 2014, and then with Covid, I've really been able to totally concentrate on being a painter without the immediate responsibilities of being a parent and a spouse. And that's been a deep pleasure at this point in my life, to just work, which is one of my favorite things to do, and delve deeply into all the knowledge I've accumulated over a lifetime of painting, which I've integrated at this point into my painting. So it's all there, but coming out in a very fluid, integrated manner, without a lot of intellectualizing of knowledge I have as bedrock. So it's, see where it takes me. Part of that integration, I started doing watercolors. A friend called up and said, oh, I'm curating a show in New York of watercolors.

Do you and Jon do watercolors? And we were on separate phones and we both went, we don't do watercolor, you know, like, really dismissively. And I hung up the phone and I thought, wow, that is a really old knee-jerk reaction to the frustration of working with watercolor. And at this point in my life, I started doing it and found that I had both the control and the willingness to let go to whatever that water does, which is all sorts of wild things. And perhaps that had the most influence on my oil painting of anything in recent time. It became more gestural, more distilled, more about being in the moment and responding. And it became pretty key in integrating a lot of earlier artists who were on Deer Isle who were seminal influences in my life. Karl Schrag, Leon Goldin, Sally Amster, David Lund, Stephen Pace, Joe Ozeki. There were a lot of really good painters up there on Deer Isle. And I grew up in their studios watching their work evolve, listening to conversations that I partially understood and later came to understand as my own work evolved. Light, people talking about light. Very abstract. What are they talking about? But going back and forth between California and New York, Connecticut and Maine.

My dad bought a place on Deer Isle in 1965, and it's been a key part of my evolution. I always say Maine has trained me to its tempo, which is pretty fast actually.

Lisa Belisle: So when you were growing up and you were spending time in the artist studios, did you have a sense that this was someday what you wanted to do?

Jill Hoy: Oh, yes. Yes. My mom knew at eighth grade. They cut art from the schools in eighth grade, and we moved a great deal. And I think drawing was a bedrock stabilization for me, a place to go that was mine. And she saw it. So she started looking for private art lessons, and we had very little money at that point. She had just opened an antique shop and a woman came in and went, wow, this is amazing. Very visual. I lived in a very visual household. And turns out that was Joanne Falbo. She had gone to Yale grad school, Virginia Commonwealth before that, and she just started mainlining it into me, became a major mentor in my life, never spared me criticism. I can pretty much take whatever's handed to me. So from then on, it really gelled. She was a great painter. And to be given a great painter at that age as a template, and a woman, was great. And she became a lifetime friend.

Lisa Belisle: It seems to me, in talking to people who are artists, that there is an ongoing back and forth and a sharing of experiences and a learning from one another about the craft, about the art. Is that true for everybody or is that just a group of people that I've been talking to?

Jill Hoy: I think you choose. It's interesting, when you go to a museum, for example, and I look at art all the time, what you respond to changes. What you may have zoned in on last year won't be what it is this year. And so different art will speak to you. And artists are notorious for plundering, for plucking. You just want to absorb what stimulates you, take note of it. And the whole act of synthesizing information is such a mysterious and wonderful one in whatever realm you're in. But visually, you know, I spent a year traveling in Europe looking at the great art of Europe when I was in my early twenties and drawing a lot and knowing that all that information was somehow going to come back out, and it did. So whether it's artists, I find looking at art that interests me, not any art. I'm a hard critic also, and pretty discerning about what I want to take in. So I can speed through a lot of art until I find what I want to talk to a person or a piece about that I find relevant to my process.

Lisa Belisle: So give me an example of some art recently that you want to spend time with.

Jill Hoy: I love Grace DeGennaro's work. And, ooh, I saw a show of Gideon Bok down in Boston that was pretty exciting. And Robin Reynolds, whose glorious flower paintings I just adore. They're just wild and deep. And I like Greta Van Campen's work, who works on the same bay, the Penobscot Bay, as I do. Oh, there's a great show of Matisse down in Philadelphia that I'm dying to see. And there's a show of Leonard Baskin at the Farnsworth. And I just bought a Lise Becu sculpture that I just adore, granite, that I've been thinking about her work for a long time. I finally sprung for it. And of course, I live with Jon Imber's work, which is awesome, and always gives me power, his presence, a great painter. Well, I'm sure I'll come up with many others. I collect a lot of art and I'm surrounded by a lot of Schrags and Goldins. Anyway, it's my life.

Lisa Belisle: You and Jon were together for how long?

Jill Hoy: I think our marriage spanned, I should know this, 25 years, something like that. Or knowing each other maybe longer.

Lisa Belisle: And how did that impact your art, to actually be with another artist?

Jill Hoy: Jon was very secure in his ego, and having a powerful wife didn't bother him. He gravitated to it. He always went out with Scorpios, and artistically it was fertile ground. He really paid attention to criticism and was pretty daring about taking it. I'm probably less so. I didn't always agree with what he was suggesting. But we made a good team, a really good team. He was good at things I'm not good at, and vice versa. I brought him to Maine. Well, he had come to Maine, that's where I met him up there. But I sort of gave him the island. And that's wrong too. He had come to Deer Isle for many years. I just opened a lot of doors, honestly, for him.

Lisa Belisle: So when you say that you've really enjoyed this phase of your life, that's really solely focused on your own art and your own process, can you think of ways that it's different from when you and Jon were both kind of coexisting as artists and creating as artists?

Jill Hoy: Well, I don't have that sophisticated eye responding to my work in a daily, almost like breathing, way, which we really, there was a lot of exchange going on, and we were always looking at each other's work and playing off it and giving feedback on what we were seeing. So that's a treasure of an experience for sure. And there are very few people whose eye I trust. I don't have that now. I live in a wonderful artist co-op in Somerville, which I spend about five months a year in. And Jon's class still comes up to Stonington. He always taught a class the third week in July, and they still come and kind of channel Jon, but are perfectly fine in themselves now without that. They definitely took in a lot of his teachings, and I've joined it as a participant to look at work and to have them look at my work. And that's probably the most formal feedback I get these days on my art. I've run a gallery up in Maine for many years, 38 maybe, in Stonington. And so I do get a lot of direct feedback. I get a lot more feedback than most artists get. And it's always interesting to get that, but that's different. It's information. It's different than really knowledgeable crit sessions.

Lisa Belisle: So if you don't have that ongoing direct feedback from someone that you trust as much as Jon, how has that impacted the last eight years?

Jill Hoy: You know, I don't really need it. I've spent a lifetime doing it, looking at it, talking about it. I have good friends who are painters at different intervals of my life. They've been in closer proximity. We all moved from California. I went to UC Santa Cruz and moved to Manhattan and lived there for many years and knew a bunch of really good artists. And so they're all still in my life. And periodically we intersect. I think I really trust myself as an artist and I like my evolution. I'm a slow spinner. And it's happening, it's evolving, and it's certainly evolving from the beginning of my career as a painter. And it's getting looser and more open and gestural and lyrical and kind of letting things float, letting drawing integrate with painting on top and below. And so it has a pulse that I find very stimulating, has a lot of kinetic energy and vitality. So I'm pretty excited about what I'm doing now, and I kind of spin back and forth between more detailed and more grounded work and then letting it go, letting it just be its thing. You have to draw your audience along with you. And they're not necessarily where my head's at, so I try to kind of bounce it back and forth. Come on, check this out.

Lisa Belisle: So I know, for people who are watching or listening to our conversation, there may be a question among the non-artists as to why watercolors are something that you and Jon originally weren't doing. And I don't know enough about art myself to understand this.

Jill Hoy: I always did gouache, which is opaque watercolor. It has chalk in it, so it's much more like oil paint. You can change your mind, lay stroke on top of stroke, it'll hold that color. You're building it. Watercolor is a wild card, and either you have to be super controlled, which doesn't interest me at all, but I draw a lot and I can really draw. So it's interesting. My approach could be drawing first or just launching into it, and you get very different results depending if you've given yourself a structure to follow or are just trusting yourself to go with it. And for years I ran a figure drawing, a nude model class. And it was always very interesting to see the difference between the paintings in those terms. So it just wasn't comfortable, I think, for either one of us to be that out of control basically.

But at this point, as I said, there's both control and openness to the wild card. And I never really asked Jon, because he was certainly open to the wild card. I think he really doubted, because we did do watercolor together and he'd douse it with water and everything would go together and it became just like morasses of color. If he'd done it more, he would've known what he wanted. He was great at pastel, one of the great pastelists of all time. I'd say watercolor just wasn't his thing.

Lisa Belisle: But now, from what you're saying, you're seeing it as actually informing non-watercolor works that you're doing?

Jill Hoy: Yes, my son just sent me a spalter brush. Oh, Gabe. He's an artisan. He's doing artisanal plastering for the top 1% of the country. And he's learned many techniques. He didn't want to be a painter. Gabe's a good critic. I listen to my son. He was really brought up listening to us and is fearless about his critiques, ruthless. And I listen to him and trust what he sees. He just sent me two brushes and I am so into using them, and he's going to give me lessons. And you know, de Kooning was a sign painter first. So a lot of those fabulous strokes that he does were with sign painting brushes. And my son just sent me this big, I think that's the spalter, it's a big brush, and Jon used big wide brushes and he'd just flow it on. So this is all back to watercolor. If you have a beautiful watercolor brush, you can get a big stroke and then taper it out to the finest tendril. And it's very exciting. Those are usually sable brushes.

Lisa Belisle: I'm really enjoying this conversation because I think, as someone who is not engaged in creating visual art at this point, understanding some of the process, some of the considerations, some of the materials, what you can do with them, that's not something that I have any background in. So as you're describing it to me, it just puts a lot of things in perspective.

Jill Hoy: Yes. Well, as perhaps you know, I'm a plein air oil painter, and I don't love the most concise setup. I'm in the wind a lot and I'm moving back and forth between colors and mixing them. So one hand is full of paintbrushes and the other hand is flying around doing. So it'll be interesting to integrate those two brushes into it. Jon would mix bowls of color and I have not done that. I used a glass palette on a stool and my canvas, and made several trips getting my gear out to the spot.

Lisa Belisle: Would you mind looking at these with me and telling me a little bit more about them?

Jill Hoy: Sometimes when I come back from Stonington and I'm not really sure what I'm doing, I'll work from oil paintings because there is so much structure and possibility in them that I can explore, and I like working on the full sheets. But I'm going to Portugal in a few days. And I just thought I'd better warm up on some watercolors. And I came to the Evergreen show and we had these exquisite corsages, and at the end there was a whole pile of them left. So I took two more in addition to mine. They were ocular enemies and roses, and when I got home, I have these small spun glass vases, and I put them in and they are still going strong. So I just started doing this series of watercolors, playing around with those just beautiful forms in the morning light. And then I just work on them all day long. They'll be sitting on the dining room table and I'll just go, ah, I just need some little more twist and curve there. So it's just been a pleasure to play around and sort of enter the realm of both studio painting and rethinking. I often will switch to figurative narrative painting, which is based on things I saw in Maine or in the city that have just anchored themselves in my mind. And I've done drawings of them. So I have a lot of those ideas flying around in there, but I haven't yet put out the oil paint. It's like juicing, getting the water into the muscle structure.

Lisa Belisle: And when you're in Portugal, is this an art trip or...

Jill Hoy: Most trips are art-based but also family. It'll be both.

Lisa Belisle: And how much art are you able to incorporate into your trips?

Jill Hoy: Oh, a lot. I'll bring watercolor, gouache, and I'll be doing it. And then I'll have a lot of good models and people there to work from. And it's supposed, it's been raining, so we'll probably do a lot of portraiture.

Lisa Belisle: When you and I met first, it was before Jon was ill, and then I knew you while Jon was ill and we worked on a story together, you and I, about your experience with Jon's illness. And then of course I've known you since that time. And I think most of us are changed by significant life events. And I would say that Jon's was a more significant life event than many people experience, just given that he, both of you, your whole family had to kind of see things progress, so that he went from being this very strong and wonderful kind of physical person to someone who created art in a very different way.

Jill Hoy: Valiantly, courageous. He was always such a courageous painter. And how he faced this whole situation of having ALS and diminishing ability, which was increasingly dramatic, down to the point of painting with headgear that crisscrossed his head, with a brush coming out, and just nodding, and it was all the neck. And that didn't last long, and then he died two days after he could no longer paint, which is pretty much what I suspect. You wonder, after he can't paint, that's so much who he was, your question. And so certainly mortality became, you'd better go for it while you can. You're strong, I'm strong, I'm in good health, and just hitting it hard, like really wanting to be the painter I am in the power I have.

Yes, I'd say that was the takeaway. And we had, going in another direction, we had an amazing community of people helping us in both communities, amazing backup and love coming to all of us, which really helped enormously. I can't tell you how many. Under the circumstances it was the best of, we had so much support, from our building, people that worked at MIT, people that were trying to figure out the technology of it, people who came back. I don't know how people do ALS by themselves, and it can certainly destroy families. It's a complicated illness, period, how we cope with it.

Lisa Belisle: And you were both young when this took place?

Jill Hoy: Jon was 64. I was 60. Gabe was 19.

Lisa Belisle: So also the fact that he had this diagnosis and he really had his life kind of compressed down in an unexpected way.

Jill Hoy: Yes. And he switched to his left hand and became a left-handed painter. So if you get the opportunity to see Imber's left hand, please see it. It's a Maine Masters movie. It is a great art movie documenting both of our lives. But, you know, heavy on Jon and how he just poured a lot of knowledge into that film, by Richard Kane. So, and Compassionate Care ALS is an awesome organization that backed us up every step of the way. Ron Hoffman, I can't say enough good things about CCALS, which is a grassroots support foundation as opposed to a research foundation, helping you navigate the demise of your body functions. Not your mind, but your body. But psychologically also, for sure, because that's a major component of that.

Lisa Belisle: So it's an interesting contrast then, where his life became compressed at the end. And he was very courageous in his approach, and he went down eventually still painting till almost the very end. But he really was a very powerful, very strong individual all the way to the end.

Jill Hoy: Yes. And certainly the public persona was one of real optimism and valiancy, and the work that came out of that is a very exciting body of work, and he felt some of the strongest in his life. And again, how integrating, switching from your right to left hand, is a big deal. Martha Diamond is a painter in New York, and she always said she'd switch to her left hand when she had any important, really key gestures to make, that it had a whole different power to it. And so too. And Nell Blaine also got polio fairly young in her life. She'd been an abstract painter initially and then switched to her left hand and her work changed entirely. So it's very interesting to see what happened. And Jon was very excited by the left hand. He really liked crudeness, authenticity, and so when you had to, it threw in the crudeness for sure. And this is all documented in the movie, so it's interesting to see.

Lisa Belisle: And then in contrast, you and I were talking about sort of this being the next third of your life, that you actually have this, presumably, expansive time ahead of you, and you are in the midst of fully experiencing that. So what does that feel like to you?

Jill Hoy: Well, I met somebody and I'm really enjoying that tremendously. So that's adding a whole other dimension. He's a musician, so he understands process, experimentation and innovation, and has great concentration and does watercolor with me also. So he'll come out and play music on site, which is outrageously great in these amazing places. And then he'll sit down and just paint also. And it's to share with someone unbroken concentration, which is a very special thing, and not to have to talk. Sometimes you get that as a portrait. I do a lot of portraits, and to have permission to sit with people in silence, or have a rhythmic flow of what goes through, is powerful. To enter that river together is a great thing, because you're really descending into the underworld almost when you paint. And just merging, as a plein air painter, I feel like I just enter as part of the environment, letting the play of tides and wind and things flying by and clouds moving. And there's a lot of information just kind of hitting you and you're cherry picking. And of course his work is totally different than mine.

Lisa Belisle: So it sounds like you're enjoying this experience.

Jill Hoy: I am. Yes. I'm very much enjoying it. So it's hard to say where that'll go in the work, but it's certainly an enlivening experience.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I know you and I have known each other during, I think, very stressful times for you in your own life. And I don't know if I've ever fully thanked you for the opportunity to spend time with you and Jon as you were going through all of this. I think you really opened up your life in a way that not everyone is willing to do.

Jill Hoy: You know, I wanted it to be as vital an experience for Jon, to make it worth his while sticking around, and to have love pouring into him, attention, validation, all those things. And I needed to replenish myself also. So part of allowing the permeability of whoever was comfortable being part of that process also allowed me to have time to recoup and be there in the way I needed to be there the rest of the time. And to know what my limitations are. Other people are better at the minutia of comfort than I am, which was not my forte.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I can't speak for anybody else but myself, but I do appreciate your willingness to be part of that, in the minor way that I was.

Jill Hoy: Oh, I think that any shedding light on that process is a powerful one, and I appreciated your intuition, your knowledge and intuition.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I hope that I get to continue to benefit from the wonderful life that you're living, as a bystander and a friend in this next third.

Jill Hoy: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: And I really appreciate you taking the time to come in and talk with me today.

Jill Hoy: Oh, thank you very much for having me.

Lisa Belisle: I've been speaking with artist Jill Hoy, and I encourage you to learn more about her through the Portland Art Gallery in Portland or online. I think that every time I see Jill's work, I just feel the vibrancy of life. And I suspect that that is not an uncommon response for people. So I've really enjoyed having the vibrancy of your personal self in the studio with me today.

Jill Hoy: Thank you. And I've loved working with the Portland Art Gallery, which is a beautiful space and vital, full of art. Beautifully done. So thank you both.