The lyric "Hello darkness my old friend" fits the mood of Daphne Hill's art. Her ambience is rarely actually darkness, although some paintings are specifically set at night. Rather, she is at ease with the dark side of life and represents it with irony.

One of her ways of dealing with phenomena we'd rather avoid is to enshrine or pay homage to it. For example, a common weed from her garden with trailing roots and all, is set against a gold background, the way medieval kings used to be honored. She looks closely at mold and this results in a painting in which spores dance almost festively. Sometimes she dedicates paintings with these noxious subjects to her friends, a risky practice if the items didn't look so elegant.

Hill puts as much time and effort into her outsized charcoal drawings as she does her paintings. Occupying most of the field of a typical drawing is a hand with long fingers and well-manicured nails. Hill says that she does have others model their hands but that she frequently draws her own. They're like self-portraits because they have alacrity and character. Hill shows the prehensile digits holding various fruits; the fruits often look too large for the hand, that's why they're grabbed rather rapaciously. Holding a couple of blood oranges in one hand seems a sort of feat. She mines the erotic possibilities of a lemon by drawing it caressed. The pattern is varied a little with the playful dangling of two cherries joined at the stem.

The key to Hill's art is realizing that her well-honed dedication to the disturbing or even creepy enters the viewers' consciousness by slow steps. We are seduced before we stop short. This is a reminder that the richest most involving art pulls us in different, somewhat opposing ways. With Daphne Hill the workout is bracing.

William Zimmer
New York City
July 2006

Mr. Zimmer was a contributing critic for The New York Times for over 20 years.