A Smattering of Paint: with Jeff Hilderley


By: Christopher Shoust


With a hat on his head to block the sunlight and a swell of ideas and emotions running through his mind, Jeff Hilderley is one of many artists that sees the world in form and pastel.

Guided by the works of Sigmar Polke, Philip Guston, Max Ernst “and about a billion others,” he would say, Hilderley plays host to a myriad of styles.

In his recent Algoma Art Gallery showing, his work was as varied as the mediums he created them on. The reason for this is mainly because the showing was a five-year retrospective of his art. A porcelain elephant atop a five-foot ladder, covered in 50 rolls of electrical tape and painted red, is one piece in his exhibit; along with nude sketches, portraits painted on masonite, straight pins in pegboard and a bolt piercing magazine display.

“You have to approach it as if it would be found by an archeologist,” says Hilderley when describing how he goes about producing his art. “Can it stand on it’s own two feet?”

Hilderley's creations all arose from a time of degradation in his past.

Hilderley graduated from Sheridan College in Toronto in 1998, as an illustrator where he says “I hated every assignment.” The structure and lines that his professors trained him to do only provoked Hilderley into boredom. “I wasn’t sure that I needed to know any of that,” he says. That’s when he realized that “I would never be an illustrator.”

Saying that statement was like an epiphany to Hilderley. Realizing that “you could actually make whatever you wanted and be good at it” was enlightening to him.

Shortly after that, Hilderley decided he needed to get away from the claustrophobia of Toronto. It was the middle of a heat wave and Hilderley confessed that he never did do very well under the sun.

His apartment at that time was above an old theatre and when it was requisitioned to be renovated by his landlord, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Hilderley was entitled to a cash sum for the inconvenience, so he took $1,200 and bought a plane ticket on Air France, to Berlin.

He stayed in a hostel for the first week in Berlin, and while waiting to cross the street one day, he met someone who would finance his stay in Germany. “I was broke."

The person he met on that street corner was a woman named Maria who was a B-movie actress and a model in what Hilderley called “Germany’s equivalent to Hustler Magazine.”

“She was supposed to come over on a Sunday to let me draw her portrait.” That was where Hilderely didn't have to worry about money anymore and his art went in a new direction. Maria funded Hilderley’s creativity in Berlin for almost three months.

This is where many of the pieces in Hilderley’s exhibit at the Art Gallery of Algmoa had originated.

The sizes of the wall hangings range from as big as 71” x 54” to as small as around two square feet.

Hilderley has returned to the Sault after many years, he would say that “people here get away with what they want to do. It’s the kind of place where you can just carve a totem pole and put in your front yard.” Hilderley says that he could only image something like that happening in southern Ontario. “There is a lot of talent in the Sault as well as emanating from it. We should give ourselves more credit.”

Do Not Reproduce or Use Without the Permission of The Writer cshoust@yahoo.ca