Bill L. Hill: Painter of Light

Bill L. Hill is an artist with strong feelings about color and light. He believes that color is a channel through which truth can flow with great efficiency. “Color,” he explains, “is one of the most pure channels of communication because it is a direct derivative of light.”

Visual art deals with light more directly than the other arts do. And an inspired artist can use color to communicate truths that cannot be communicated by music, writing, or any other art. But all the arts complement each other, Brother Hill continues. Each has its own means of touching us.

Along with painting, Bill is an accomplished musician. Having studied and listened to music—its chords, patterns, and harmonics—he has developed his own theory of color. Bill is convinced that just as music creates its effects on us when tones and chords are arranged in certain families, groupings, and ranges, so do certain combinations of color as they are used together in a work.

Even though this principle is not revolutionary, Brother Hill began to realize its spiritual implications for himself as an artist. He adds, “I want to communicate the messages of light, beauty, and excellence that are part of the Light of Christ, but first I have to have a measure of these in me. You can’t give something you don’t have.” (See D&C 50:24 and D&C 88:67.)

A colorful individual himself with a white, well-trimmed beard, white wavy hair, and gray-blue eyes, Brother Hill has trained himself to distinguish colors where others generally do not. He believes that we can see subtle colors better in our peripheral vision—colors which, if focused upon, disappear.

“I had to learn to control the use of my eyes to really see what was there before I destroyed it by focusing sharply. This occurred to me one day when I was driving in the southern Utah desert. Flashes of color, evident out of the corner of my eye, vanished when I looked directly at them,” he said. “All atmospheric matter, such as dust and moisture particles, acts as microscopic prisms splintering the sunlight into its rainbow parts, creating an environment of all colors everywhere present.”

Beyond his selection of intense color, Bill uses a deliberate technique of “layering” his canvas—successive applications of transparent treatment with “all colors everywhere present.” He says that this procedure allows the light to penetrate the work, glance from various tinted facets, and ricochet outward as live energy—somewhat as light plays in a fire-opal or diamond.

Brother Hill didn’t start painting full-time until he was forty-five years old. Now sixty-seven, he works in his thirty-foot-by-forty-foot studio located behind his home in Mendon, Utah, at the foot of the Wellsville Mountains in Cache Valley. He is the high priests group instructor in his ward, and his wife, Carolyn, and he are temple specialists in their stake.

Light is one of God’s gifts to us, he declares, and it is most appropriately used when turned back to its source in devoted service. (See D&C 88:50.) Bill’s painting is his devoted service and his passion. He sees himself as a receptacle through which light and inspiration flow—an apprentice studying under the Master Artist.

Photography by Jed Clark