(Hillarey Breedlove’s Mom Brigade.)
By Betsy DiJulio
Not so long ago, Hillarey Breedlove was painting portraits of cows adorned with floral wreaths and polished bells on antique breadboards in Germany. IYKYK.
If you don’t know, Viehscheid aka Almabtrieb is an autumnal Bavaria festival celebrating the cows’ successful summer of grazing in the high alpine meadows. The bells ward off evil spirits during their trek down from the peaks, and their journey concludes with traditional music, folk dancing, local food and, of course, beer.
Now Breedlove paints portraits of mid-century women adorned with aprons, often inspired by the sexist advertisements of the era.
The artist met her husband in high school. Both attended the University of Tennessee, him on an Army ROTC scholarship. Armed with a bachelor’s degree in drawing and painting with a minor in art history, she married her soldier and the couple set off on the itinerant life of a military family, having two daughters along the way.
Not only did they move a lot, but they were often separated from each other with no family support nearby. Breedlove threw herself into quasi-single motherhood from Hawaii to Germany, drawing on her childhood penchant for stitching clothes and making furniture for her Barbie by sewing her girls’ clothes. She concurrently made a deep dive into another creative pursuit: gourmet cooking. Homemade baby food, anyone?
Time passed and, eventually, Breedlove had not touched a paintbrush for 14 years. But when the family moved to Germany—home of the Viehscheid—she got back into art via paint nights and commissions for the other Army wives. Many of these women collected round antique bread boards and one asked Breedlove if she would paint a cow on hers. Before long, the artist had completed some 200 of these niche animal portraits.
When the family moved from Germany to Suffolk amidst COVID restrictions, Breedlove found herself still doing commissions, many of them traditional pet portraits. Finally, she asked herself if that was what she really wanted to be doing. The answer was a hard no. Still, she feared she wasn’t a “real artist.”
But then she turned 40. And the desire for “creative freedom to explore her thoughts” outweighed her imposter syndrome. Soon, she had “picked up the conversation from 20 years prior in school” and left dogs and cats behind for women’s roles and social issues, balancing her artistic practice with her role as executive director of the Suffolk Art League.
Up until that point, she had felt occasional shame at being “just” a stay-at-home mom for so many years. But her perspective began to shift and, before long, she recognized that she was proud of raising strong, independent young women.
With the newfound, hard-won belief that her story was “good enough to tell,” she started making large paintings—her comfort zone—in 2022. With the imprint of a childhood spent “content to mess around my room making things,” she discovered the joy and satisfaction of mixing materials, especially paper and fabric with all their domestic associations and nostalgia. Multi-generational women approached her at the opening reception for Rinse, Lather, Repeat, because the fabrics and sewing patterns triggered memories for them.
Says the artist-gourmet home cook, “I have a recipe of things that I think work; you don’t want to be singing the same song every day.” Knowledgeable about color theory, she “loves bright colors” and likes it “when colors dance.” While Breedlove admits to being obsessed with fluorescents, she is intentional in their use and doesn’t care if people find them “ugly.” But don’t let the eye-popping colors fool you: sometimes irony takes on a dark tone. Spoiler: mother’s little helpers are not her cherubic children, but a handful of pills.
Breedlove’s large, layered, and brightly colored paintings might begin with the ground, the physicality of the paint, or what Breedlove calls the “flow and show.” Over that, this self-proclaimed lover of “the process and significance of the artist’s hand” might at times project images onto her prepared grounds, painting them by hand rather than stenciling their likenesses. However, she does incorporate stenciling into the archeology of each canvas in the form of repeated patterns along with what she calls hidden “Easter eggs.” These remnants and other imagery aren’t always visible to the viewer, but she knows they are there.
On the other hand, the paintings might be inspired by something verbal—an expression—or visual, like an image from an ad in her collection of vintage magazines. Breedlove is fascinated (and low-key outraged) by the ways women have been marketed to. She finds the post-WWII period especially poignant with all its threads of mid-century modernity, baby booming, and civil rights stirrings.
But those threads are woven into the artist’s present reality. “I feel like I’ve been dieting my whole life,” she says, processing society’s mixed messages to women, e.g. be thin, but not to thin; be pretty, but not too pretty. Or, as in Ferrera’s Gloria’s monologue in the movie Barbie, “Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong.”
“Hillarey Breedlove: Lather, Rinse, Repeat—Diary of a Homemaker”
Through October 1
Artist Gallery @ Sandler Center for Performing Arts
Monday – Friday: 10am – 4pm/Saturday: 10am – 2pm
sandlercenterfoundation.org/sandler-artist-gallery