Skip Hill’s art focuses on the beauty of composition, the exuberance of process, on positive and negative space, on contrasts of mood, colors and flowing line work. Some of the most captivating parts of his mixed-media drawings are in the peripheral details sourced from Art History, elements of folk art, tattoo-like expressive patterning, looping graphic lines, kinetic scribbling, Asian calligraphy, Pop culture references and African motifs. Skip Hill has produced a body of work that includes mixed-media drawings, paintings on canvas and wood, collages on paper, and large-scale interior and exterior murals.
Skip Hill is featured for his illustrations in Opal’s Greenwood Oasis, written by Najah-Amatullah Hylton and Quraysh Ali Lansana. This children’s book follows protagonist Opal Brown as she goes about her day in the Greenwood part of Tulsa in 1921.
The illustrations included in Opal’s Greenwood Oasis recapture the vitality of Greenwood’s storied past through the bright eyes of a Black girl riding her bicycle through the streets of her beloved community. The spirit of Opal’s story and the world she lives in, is conveyed in her observation that “In Greenwood, we have everything we need, and it might surprise you to know that everyone looks like me.”
All proceeds from book sales go to Fulton Street Books.
