Henry Hill (artist)
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Henry Hill, born 1918 in Oak Park, Illinois, the son and grandson of executives within a furniture company. He studied fine arts at Cornell University, but dropped out only a year before completing his studies. He moved to California in 1939, hoping to join the newly-founded Disney Company as an artist, but was not hired. Shortly afterward, he joined the Army as the United States entered World War II, where he entered Officer Candidate School, becoming a first lieutenant. Fighting in Europe and Africa, he eventually succumbed to battlefield shock, spending much of the war in a psychiatric ward in Italy.
After the war, he moved to Los Angeles, studying art at the University of Southern California, and in 1950, becoming involved with the Dianetics movement, and a casual friend of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard, showing specific interest in Reichian therapy. He worked as a chiropracter and a Reichian therapist until the 1960s when he joined the hippie movement. A frequent user of LSD, Hill began to obsessively paint beginning in the late 1960s. Hill ran as a Republican for the United States Senate, on a platform advocating the legalization of marijuana and prostitution.
Most of his artwork seems to center on psychadelic interpretations of form drawing and architecture. He also frequently uses negative space on white matboard, choosing to mark wide swaths with black marker to reveal thin unmarked matboard, forming an image. He first began exhibiting his artwork in 1994.