Artist Sherrill Hill stays focused on light
Sherrill Hill vividly recalls a childhood filled with family gatherings at her North Main home, which once belonged to her grandmother. “I never looked at this place as anything but a social space,” she says.
Continuing that vision, each spring and fall Hill shares it with other artists through The Artist Next Door, a juried art show. It gives local artists a unique venue to display their work.
“I like a village and this energy at my house. I thought, ‘Why can’t I just host shows and help people, because I knew how hard it was for me raising children and maintaining an artist’s practice,” she says of starting the show ten years ago after years of solo exhibitions in her on-site studio.
During the free-to-attend event—Hill organizes it with fellow artists April Huguenin and Craig Ragsdale—artists spread outside across the property, exhibiting paintings, ceramics, jewelry and accessories, and turned-wood sculptures. The relaxed atmosphere benefits both the artists and the attendees. “Everyone can talk to the artists, and it’s more tangible,” Hill says.
In celebration of its ten-year anniversary and thanks partly to a Metropolitan Arts Council grant, The Artist Next Door expanded from one afternoon to two days this spring. The grant allowed organizers to bring in student musicians from the Fine Arts Center and increase promotion efforts.
While the show elicits plenty of gratitude from participants, Hill says, “I didn’t start it for that. I benefit from the energy; I cannot describe it to people.”
Layers of Meaning
She pours that energy into her vibrant stained glass and multi-layered mixed-media paintings inspired by nature. Whether those artworks portray a tree set amid a mountain landscape, a grouping of flowers, a bird against an abstract background, or the butterflies conceptualized for a planned update to McPherson Park, Hill deftly creates each one with light as the focal point.
“Light is very healing, and glass, it calms me,” she says, sitting in the gallery she built atop the pool house in her backyard. The serene space allows potential collectors to connect with the stained-glass pieces in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows and the paintings that cover the back wall.
Those glassworks start as pencil sketches on paper in her freestanding studio on the property. Then, she selects colored glass from the studio’s cubbies, hand-cuts the pieces into the needed shapes, joins them, and places them into hand-built wooden frames.
Painting is Hill’s creative counterpoint to the labor-intensive glassworks process. Each mixed-media piece builds up layers—oil atop acrylic, rust and oxidation, or metal and glass accents—on the wood panels she constructs. “Everything I do, I think in textures and colors,” she says.
Her passion for stained glass started when she was a student at the University of South Carolina and interned at a local stained-glass shop. She learned the medium hands-on. “I never took a class,” she says of the process of building frames and fulfilling customers’ requests.
Yet she can trace her beginnings as an artist to her childhood. She learned to use tools in her father’s workshop and to paint with her grandmother, an artist who frequently depicted trees and swamps. “We just painted as a family,” she says. “It started my tree obsession.”
When she studied theater at the Fine Arts Center, creating sets and backdrops “got me into building things and creating a feeling. So, when I looked at art, I looked at you walking into a room and how does it make you feel,” she says.
“[Art is] not just a piece; it has to speak to you,” she adds.
A Gift for Grants
The Metropolitan Arts Council grant given to The Artist Next Door came with an added surprise for Sherrill Hill. She received the 2024 Truman Henderson Award for Excellence in Grant Writing.
The award is named in honor of Henderson, who served on MAC’s board of directors and co-chaired the grants committee for 20 years, and recognizes a grant demonstrating excellence in writing execution, organization, and concept.
“I had no idea,” she says of the award’s announcement at MAC’s annual meeting and awards ceremony in March. “To be recognized was such a surprise. I just do this for other people.”
To see more of Hill’s artwork, visit sherrillsartglass.com or follow @sherrillsartglass on Instagram. The Artist Next Door will take place on October 4 and 5. For the latest updates, follow @artistnextdoor_gvl.
