Please join us March 4, 2023 from 6-8pm for an opening reception. The gallery is located at 423 W. San Francisco St., Santa Fe, NM 87501.

TITLE Gallery is pleased to present Fear of Flying, a solo exhibition of paintings by Hudson Heil. In his debut solo exhibition, Heil acts with an awareness of palette and mindfulness of medium. With a loose hand and spirit, the artist embraces thick muddy surfaces complimented by vibrant straight-from-the-oil-stick mark making. The impressive size of works included in the exhibition, many standing at a height of 7’, allow for larger-than-life figures. A vague narrative starring saintly figures, historical fathers, sailboats, and hawks carries throughout the work, yet leaving enough ambiguity that allows the viewer to wonder. Portraits and fables are interwoven and exemplified in brash, thick strokes made with Heil’s mastered awareness of color, light, shadow, and theory that celebrate the act and medium of painting. The body of work presented in Fear of Flying was impressively made in the span of 21 days. Heil invites the spectator to take part in the artist’s journey of self-edifying flames and the lightness of flight. 

Artist’s Statement:

Loving is a way of flying. Painting has become a dialogue with a certain narrative of Humility, Pride, Shame, Vulnerability, Masculinity, Ambition, Morals, Contradictions, Madness, Sex, Magic and everything that relates to this flying that retains a certain freedom I am searching for. What is the context within these things that relate to loving and the fear that stops us from reaching it?

The fluidity of oil paint pushes me to see how vulnerable I can get without the ease of covering things as quickly as acrylic mediums have granted me in the past. How deep can I look into something morbid and turn it into something loving? Intuition is something equally destructive as it is refreshingly bright if it allows my love to grow.

Hudson Heil, A Heart Is A Fist Wrapped In Blood (Triptych), 2023, oil on canvas, 22 x 18 in. each.

The recurring themes of deep intuitive truth within myself and the world around me in addition to the layering process of making pictures to take myself through the rise and fall of the mind, has been active in my work since I began painting. 

Can pictures separate the divide within us that leads us to fear or love

And what exactly that is and how far do we dip into either side unknowingly

Can these images lure what is instinctively loving within us

Can these images lure what is instinctively fearful within us

Can I draw the line within myself with these pictures

Can a picture draw the line for me

Looking at the broad scope of art history, nothing has inspired me more than the chain of processing the human experience. To look back at art before, process the mediums, take what's current, cut the whole thing open, and point forwards. For better or for worse. But ultimately achieving a long, sincere evolution in how we relate to each other and to ourselves, with a bit of arrogance that pushes the whole thing forward.

It would be naive to say all art has the aim for inward seeking, but I hope to reach the viewer and point at this same inward search I look for in myself and other artists have done before me. To find an inner truth in aim for a greater truth between each other. That is painting, the intuitive way into a self found truth. Then to destroy it, and sell it off again. 

Hudson Heil (b. 2001) is a self-taught artist with a background of commercial fishing. Born in Homer, Alaska, Heil shared his upbringing between Colorado and Alaska and now resides in New Mexico. Heil’s work is influenced largely from his travels, fishing in Alaska, and reading. His paintings approach various themes regarding symbolism, archetypes and storytelling through reference from daily life and found objects.