Artist has array of styles

     By Tiffannie Bond
     View staff writer
      Artists are known for their dominant styles.
      Picasso was known for his abstract cubism. Jazz musician Dizzy Gillespie was known for his puffed-out cheeks and signature, upward-bent trumpet.
      Local artist Jon Hul is more known for his variety of styles, which range from entertainment figures to nudes to a surrealistic portrait of a little girl feeding swans at a pond.
      Distinctions define Hul's life. His art and home life mirror each other only in the differences they keep. His art is a spectrum of colors, subjects and styles that grace the common home he shares with his wife, Terina, and 6-year-old daughter, Sophia. From there, his artwork goes to the sophisticated bantering of the art gallery where his paintings line different walls, there to be seen and sold.
      "I don't limit myself," Hul said. "I don't call it a sacrifice. I call it a criteria, and I fulfill it."
      Hul's career as an artist is shaping up to be every bit as eclectic as his earlier career as a musician, when he performed such divergent styles as jazz, blues and country. His art reflects those musical influences -- Eric Clapton, Tina Turner, Yanni and Frank Sinatra have all appeared on one of Hul's canvases.
      The 1976 Valley High School graduate first picked up an art pencil during his senior year of high school to draw from a photograph from "Playboy" magazine. It was later exhibited for a day before it was taken down due to its content. Today, it's his most prized piece.
      His artwork now hangs exclusively at the Gallerie di Sorrento fine art gallery, located inside the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace on the Strip, where keeping Hul's celebrity artwork on the wall is often difficult.
      "(His) Marilyn Monroe piece sold within 24 hours of being shown in the gallery," said Jeff Kamka, company director for Gallerie di Sorrento. "Most of his originals, as far as the celebrities go, will last a month, (which is) a very long time for a Jon Hul to stay on the wall."
      After a while, Hul packed his bags and moved to Los Angeles, where he lived for several years before moving back to Las Vegas a few years ago. In Los Angeles, Hul started his celebrity art while working for companies that promoted album covers on Sunset Boulevard. There, he painted everybody from Michael Jackson to Bruce Springsteen.
      Hul's celebrity artwork isn't all that sells. During the Fourth of July and New Year's Eve weekends, two of the busiest times of the year for casino retailers, Hul's female nude artwork will be featured in a showing.
      "I wasn't really doing any celebrity art. I always shied away from it, but I found out soon after moving to L.A. there is a criteria for it," Hul said. "(But) there's also the dime-a-dozen situation, too. I did it because I liked it and people liked it and it made a living for me. But I always had this fetish for doing erotic and figurative art."
      Said Kamka: "His celebrity pieces are very true realistic pieces. The nudes tend to be a little more surrealistic. Those pieces are a little bit different than the celebrity pieces."
      Some of Hul's nude pieces are more revealing than others; some leave much to the imagination.
      "Nude (doesn't) necessarily have to mean showing anything but a shoulder and maybe a kneecap," Hul said. "In a boudoir setting, you have dramatic lighting and you're completely covered. Just the look on your face can be very intense."
      Hul paints from photographs as well as models, but most of his ideas, he said, come from out of the blue.
      For "Prevail," an image of a woman who seems to be painting herself into the painting, Hul used a model and photographs from "Playboy" and of a woman's legs.
      He doesn't stop at nudes and celebrity figures. He also does commissioned pieces and portraits, which made Ben and Linda Reid's trip from Houston a little indecisive. After viewing Hul's "Yanni" piece for 20 minutes, they could not decide what style to choose. He wanted a portrait, while she opted for the celebrity route.
      "I think Jon could really do something that would be acceptable and pleasing," Ben Reid said. "It's just a question of she and I agreeing on what we want."
      That's the main problem for most of Hul's art collectors: what style to buy.
      Aside from the nudes and celebrities, he also does surrealistic paintings, mixed with realism.
      "I got sick and tired of doing something from a photograph and putting on canvas or whatever (other material) I was painting or drawing on," Hul said. "I felt like I graduated from establishing my name with a lot people by doing the celebrity stuff. I wanted to show a lot of people the creative side of what I do.
      "I'm a big M.C. Escher fan. I wanted to incorporate a M.C. Escher meets Jon Hul in the creative sense where I'm using figurative with some optical illusion."
      A piece that hangs in Hul's dining room is often a topic of conversation. "Playtime Pond" features a little girl feeding swans that are swimming in a pond. One swan has a piece to a puzzle in his beak, a piece that has come out of the painting he inhabits.
      "When people come into my house, their eyes dart to that. They say, `Why did you frame an unfinished puzzle?' and I said `It's not a puzzle, it's a painting of a puzzle.' And then we'd argue," he said.
      These ideas, however realistic or surrealistic, are in his head before he touches brush to canvas.
      "The scariest thing for any artist before you even get started with a painting or a drawing is a white canvas," Hul said.
      No matter what the style, Hul's artwork has a home in Gallerie di Sorrento where Kamka said his art is displayed as much as possible.
      "He is a hyper-realist," Kamka said. "His pieces are extremely realistic, and I think that is what's drawing people into his pieces."
      Including many people from Las Vegas.
      Although Hul claims the Las Vegas art culture still has "a long way to go," he said it's much better than his days at Valley High, when the area was a "pit-stop for experimentation."
      Jon Hul went through his life experimenting with different genres of music and art, so it is only fitting that he made his home in Las Vegas.