Jeffrey Hill's art graces numerous Walla Walla winery walls, bottle labels

WALLA WALLA — A cold, wind-whipped rain mixed with snow taps on the expanse of windows separating Jeffrey Hill's living room from his 11-acre vineyard.

The vines outside are threadbare and brown on this late autumn day. Across small farms and fields to the east lie the Blue Mountains, white with snow and giving way to a mottled brown and green as they meld into the valley floor.

It's here that Hill paints, sculpts and grows wine grapes with his wife, Cathryn, in their Forgotten Hills vineyard. The scenes and people on his canvas — painted in a style influenced by Van Gogh's use of vivid colors and texture and Diego Rivera's "simple lines" — are hallmarks of his art.

His style has become so popular that a dozen wineries, plus eateries and Walla Walla Community College's new wine center, display original murals, pictures, statuary and label art they've commissioned from Hill.

His art also has raised thousands of dollars — $30,000 alone this year, up from $15,000 last year, he says — at wine auction benefits for Pacific Northwest scholarships and charities.

"You've got to give to get," he says. "And what's the downside of helping others?"

Bonding with the workers

Hill, 48, says his works are as much about the area's pastoral wine country as they are homage paid to people who toil in the fields and work in the cellars. He says he strives for "that wonderful sense of man and nature."

"Vineyard scenes are pretty boring by themselves," he says. "They're all about human connection."

Inspiration, he says, often comes from his own experience as a grower and the respect and affection he has for vineyard crews who labor with him.

"The work is exhausting, no matter what kind of work in the vineyard you're doing," says Hill. "I cannot express enough the love for the people who have helped me in my vineyard."

One person in particular is Modesto Bautista, a crew supervisor whom Hill says has devised several ways to get the sometimes repetitive and physically demanding vineyard work done more efficiently.

"I bonded with him from the get-go, and have literally worked sweat, blood and tears right next to him in my process of growing up in the industry," Hill says. "He looks out for the vineyards as if they were his own."

Hill is known as the "Vineyard Van Gogh," a moniker given him by Denise and Brett Isenhower after they commissioned him in 1999 to paint a bottle label for their Isenhower Cellars wines.

Its similarity to Van Gogh's impressionist style is obvious: heavy brushstrokes of a woman in red stooping over a box of grapes at the end of a lush green vineyard row, under a giant, flaring sun of yellow and orange.

Though the wine has earned a string of awards and high scores, Denise Isenhower credits Hill's art with generating untold sales.

"A lot of people who are wine drinkers are into art as well," she says. "It's a very symbiotic relationship."

Hill's latest sculpture, a work titled "Grand Crew," is a 10-foot-tall sand-cast bronze statue of a weathered harvest worker looking toward some distant horizon and smiling as he hauls a lug of harvested grapes over his head. Dedicated this fall, it stands at the entrance of Walla Walla Community College's Center for Enology and Viticulture.

Although Bautista was his mental model for the statue, Hill says it could as easily represent his great-grandfather Jacob Hill, who immigrated to Eastern Washington in the late 1800s to eke out a living as a dryland wheat farmer. Or, for that matter, he adds, it could be anyone of any ethnicity who comes to America to build a better life for his or her children.

Chalking up a career

A fourth-generation Walla Walla native, Hill became interested in painting by looking over the shoulder of his father, a trained commercial artist who also supported his family by driving a delivery truck.

That led to Hill's first mural — a multistage Atlas rocket complete with a Gemini space capsule across the blackboard of his fourth-grade classroom, all done in chalk during a single recess. Soon to follow was a mural of Custer's Last Stand — in his bedroom.

Instead of his mother becoming angry that he'd painted on the walls, he recalls her saying, " 'I think that means you just got to do it.' "

In fifth grade, he spent part of his days studying art at Walla Walla High School. After graduating in 1974, he then studied at Whitman College, double-majoring with honors in studio art and art history.

He completed his formal training at Sotheby's Institute of Art in London, then returned to the Pacific Northwest to paint Western Washington landscapes and run his antique Mission furniture business in Seattle.

Life brought him back to Walla Walla in the mid-1990s.

"I dragged Cathryn and the kids here during a kind of midlife crisis," he says. "We were living in a comfortable home in West Seattle but had been through two break-ins, an earthquake and a drive-by shooting."

They decided to move when a home on 13 acres south of Walla Walla went on the market. The place happened to be across the fence from Hill's boyhood home. But what to do next?

"I came here without a job and wanted to make an income," he says. With he and his wife both avid gardeners, he called a county agriculture extension agent about what he could grow on rocky soil. The agent suggested wine grapes.

With no vineyard experience, Hill hired veteran Walla Walla Valley grower and winemaker Berle "Rusty" Figgins as a consultant on what to plant and how to cultivate it.

Mixing luck and talent

In May 1996, he and Cathryn began planting and trellising the first vines of what would become Forgotten Hills Vineyard's 11 acres of merlot, cabernet sauvignon and syrah that they sell to seven local wineries.

With vines in the ground, Hill started looking for way to also make a living with his artistic talents.

He says he thought of focusing on Western art, but was steered in another direction after talking to Jill Zagelow, owner of the former Paula Ray Gallery in downtown Walla Walla.

Her advice to him was simple and direct: "If you can do anything with grapes, vineyards or wine, do it. I sell everything I have with that kind of subject."

The first piece he sold was through a chance encounter with Marty and Megan Clubb, owners of L'Ecole No. 41 winery.

The Clubbs live near Hill and were out walking in spring 1997 as Hill was working in his vineyard. He invited them to his home, and after seeing five paintings in his studio, they bought four to display at their winery.

"That was the starting gun," Hill says, adding that other local vintners and visitors who saw his work at L'Ecole kept the ball rolling by commissioning new works to display in their wineries, homes and businesses.

This fall, he and two business partners started Artmark, a gallery that sells Hill's originals and prints above the Vintage Cellars winebar in downtown Walla Walla.

That Hill found success in both growing and painting grapes was largely a matter of being "in the right place and the right time," he says.

But it's also partly due to what he calls the "blessing" of living in the area.

"It's the story of Walla Walla," he says. "It's the encouragement of its own natural talent — and its natural goodies."

Thomas P. Skeen: 509-525-3300 or tskeen@ubnet.com