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(up-tempo classical music) - She was a complete artist.

She wanted to be involved in everything concerning art.

She wanted to do it, she wanted to study about it, she wanted to see it, but more than anything else, she really did paint.

And so many of us, I think, don't.

We intend to, and we want to, and we paint a little, and we paint next week, but Marie painted constantly.

- [Marie] I would often paint 16 hours a day, and I have painted 24 hours a day if I needed to.

- [Bill] She was just this sort of extraordinary matriarchal sort who wandered around in those outrageous clothes, and going to her place over there on Bill Evans Street was more like attending the Oracle of Delphi or something.

(classical piano music) - Marie Hull was a musician before she was an artist.

She had a degree from Bellhaven College.

In fact, her family had moved from Summit, Mississippi, to Jackson, so that Marie could go to school.

- She began seriously studying art around 1912, when there were still very few schools of art, relatively few opportunities to exhibit, though it was a time when this whole art scene was expanding.

She went to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts where many young people went, and particularly young women from the South, it's one of the places they went.

She was amazingly productive.

- She studied with some very prominent anatomy teachers, and they of course were very intent on the students learning all about the bone structure and the muscle structure of the person posing, and so she did a series of studies similar to this one.

After spending about two years at the Pennsylvania Academy, she came back and taught art at Hillman College in Clinton.

It was the women's division of Mississippi College.

- She told me that nobody was more surprised than she was when she got married.

- She and Emmett had lived in Florida for a period of time, and she was most interested in the birds and plants of Florida, and so the paintings in the '20s, many of 'em were done in Florida.

After winning a prize in San Antonio, Texas, a Texas wildflower painting competition, she decided to use that money and go and study in Europe, and she did.

- I think at that point she was getting into her own way of working, because she said that she painted a yucca plant at a time when people just didn't paint them, and that what won the prize.

- [Malcolm] She had an opportunity to join a group that traveled and studied art on the spot in various places in France, Spain, and Morocco.

- [Marie] There were no teachers in Mississippi or anywhere around here that I felt like if I studied, I ought to go to the source where the best teaching was to be had.

I never had any confidence in second and third and fourth-grade teachers, so I began to save my money, and plan a long era of study.

- What fascinated me was to look at the paintings that were dated 1929.

That was the year she spent in Europe, about six or eight months, I believe.

And she was incredibly prolific at that time.

She painted, I think by her own count, and she didn't seem to be surprised by it, about 100 large paintings, 50 small paintings, 600 watercolors.

Here's somebody who was really active.

But if you look at those works, they're not all the same style.

She's trying out a number of different things.

- [Doris] One of the things she'd tell me about her trip to Europe, which I also remember it, I was impressed, had asked her about her night paintings, how she did her night paintings.

And she said well they made them memorize their palette so that they could paint at night without any light, because if they took a light along, of course it would change their perception of the color.

- She stayed for a length of time, and would've stayed longer, but the Depression came.

In fact, Mr.

Hull was to join her, but the Depression came, and that canceled his trip.

- Going back to the Depression, Marie Hull survived and supported herself and her husband.

He was an architect, and people weren't building during the Depression.

But she did it mainly by painting magnolias, and she said she would never put down anyone for painting magnolias, because they saved her life.

- [Malcolm] And during the '30s, she painted sharecroppers, because there were not a lot of commission portraits.

- [Roy] These were actual men who, during the Depression, came door to door, and of course came to Mrs.

Hull's house to work in the yard, to sharpen scissors, to do anything they could do to make a living for their family during the Depression.

- [Marie] I was able to get the sharecroppers from the country, and the old family servants, people we had grown up knowin'.

- [Roy] She often gained their help by having them pose in the yard, under trees, and this is the portrait that had some of these magnificent hands.

- She liked good strong people, and those portraits of the sharecroppers and the black people, they were good strong characters.

And that meant a great deal to her.

I used to be afraid of her maid, Melissa.

Melissa always seemed to be very stern, and I'd ring the doorbell, and Melissa would open the door, and she'd have this expression on her face like well, it's him again.

And so I was telling Mrs.

Hull years later, after Melissa had gone somewhere else, and she said, "Oh, Melissa loved you."

But I don't know.

The expression on her face didn't say so.

- [Malcolm] This oil painting is a study of Annie Smith.

Annie Smith was Marie Hull's maid when she and Emmett Hull were married.

She had very strict rules that she made Marie and Emmett adhere to, and one was that she didn't allow them to play cards or play the radio on Sunday, and I think that some of the sternness of Annie Smith is captured in this beautiful little portrait.

This portrait,   The Sharecropper, or  The Egg Man, it's actually called both, is a portrait of a subject that she selected on her own.

She painted all of this series of paintings with great dignity, and there was such a feeling of the soil, of the place.

- I'm sure that as a woman in the '20s and '30s and all that it was a hard time in art.

In a way, it kinda still is.

- She was one of those selected for the 1939 World's Fair exhibition in New York City, in New York, the great 1939 exhibits.

And there were something like over 1,000 paintings, which was probably too much for anybody to see, but she was one of those selected, and there were only 90 women in that show.

So that you see where as in terms of women exhibiting, even though she was very active, this was still relatively unusual for a woman to have as productive an artistic career as she had, I think, for her generation.

- I've heard the remark that she painted like a man.

That she was so strong in her statements on her canvases that you would have mistaken her for a man rather than a woman painting.

Usually a woman will have a little more delicate touch than Marie Hull had.

She had many subtleties in her painting, but she always came across very, very strong, in her personality as well as her paintings.

- She's, came up to me one day and said, "Don't you think you oughta take some lessons from me?"

And I said yes.

- The classes on her porch were always a lot of fun.

There was always a lot of talk and a lot of humor.

- I went over there a couple of Saturdays, and I'd see these people out on a screen porch painting and going through the equivalent of lessons, I suppose.

But it all looked like great garden party to me.

- Well, she was strict and serious about what she was teachin' and that impressed me a lot, and helped me, because she made me do the things I didn't wanna do.

And she was critical when she thought she should be critical.

- [Marie] I feel a certain closeness with many people that I've taught, and most of my best friends are recruited from former students, and they're all over the state.

So that develops a close relationship, and that varies according to that underlying motive of the student's work.

If they work for quality, I feel closer to them than if they're workin' to put a frame around somethin' and sell it to some ignorant person real quick, you know, and hang over the parlor mantle so everybody'll brag on 'em.

And it's like playin' the piano by ear: I'm less interested in students like that than the ones who put quality first.

- I was surprised that this very dignified looking older lady was going to teach me, but it wasn't long till I realized that she had more youth about her than I had at that early age, and she was kind and considerate most of the time, until I really did something wrong.

- She was a born teacher, and we all in her classes learned the terror of the turpentine rag.

You'd paint something, and she'd come in and look at it, and she'd say, "Well I thought you had "better sense than that.

"Take a turpentine rag and wash that "completely clean and start over."

- She was a, I think the word's martinet.

She was thumbs down, this is it, kids.

This is the way it is.

- She believed that everybody can be taught, that they have an innate sense of art, that you may not be a Picasso, most of us will never be, but you're teachable, as far as Marie Hull was concerned.

- I can take anybody with good, average intelligence, and hopefully a small amount of talent, and I can give them a money-back guarantee that by a certain time I can completely change the things that they like.

- She was rawhide, but it was tempered with sweetness.

She was a fine lady, and a kind one.

- She was extremely fond of Andrew, and felt a very close relationship with him.

- Andrew Bucci, as you know, the native of Vicksburg, had taken lessons from her.

He had gone to school and learned a lot in design, which was something that was very weak when she was in school.

- He came back and taught Marie later all of the new things that were going on throughout the country at that time.

- So here you have the teacher becoming the student, and vice versa.

This was a lifelong association, and a lifelong admiration society.

- My relationship with her, she was like another member of the family, another mother or another aunt or somebody like that.

And what I benefited from was her concern for me, because she was very good about seeing that I worked, and she would see to it that I would submit to things or I would leave things with her.

She occasionally would sell things, even.

So I think I got far, far more out of it than she ever did.

- She was herself an eternal student.

- She was out there to learn.

She would say, "Come home with me, let's talk.

"I wanna pick your brain."

And that's exactly what she would do.

(classical piano music) - [Marie] I'm frank to say that I'm sort of a lyrical, romantical painter, in the sense that color means so much to me.

- [Doris] I think people don't appreciate the fact that her color that she used, her color mixes, I don't mean mixing two paints, but like the impressionists, a dab of this and a dab of that next to each other.

I'm sure it was influenced possibly by the impressionists.

But she did it in a different manner.

If you'll notice, she does it so the colors are all in the same value.

So if you photographed it in black and white, it would probably be pretty solid.

But she has vibrating color in a solid shade.

- [Andrew] But basically, down underneath it all, what she had was just a rock-solid technique and a fine sense of color, and she had a good, native intelligence and intuition about what made a good picture.

- [Louis] Mrs.

Hull had a keen eye for lights and darks, and for the whole range of color, and she especially loved reds and colors related to red.

And pink, of course, was her favorite color.

- She was a pink painter, all right, but her pinks ranged from the color I'm wearing to shades of red, all the way to the very tiniest blush of pink, so her range that she called pink was phenomenal.

- [Andrew] When I first met her, she had, as I remember, a lot of drawings and paintings around of different kinds of birds.

At that point her favorite color was sort of a blue-green color that she used a lot.

Now, she may have gotten that from Shearwater Pottery, 'cause she liked their pottery a lot.

- The first thing that I really remember about Marie Hull is the fact that she immediately invited us up to her house in Jackson.

So we went, of course, Emmett was there, her husband, he and Walter got along very well.

They enjoyed each other, and Marie made do with me but she really wanted him.

- And Marie was in and out of the home on so many occasions, and she befriended Walter when he was at Whitfield, and had him come to her home and supplied him with art materials, and they talked.

They were just very good friends.

- I went to the Coast with Marie shortly after Walter Anderson had died.

We were down there for a painting workshop, and while we were down there, Marie wanted to go to see Sissy, Walter's wife, because they had been longtime friends.

- She gave me a little painting that she had done in the Smoky Mountains at the time when the trees were at their best coloring.

She was terribly generous.

- [Roy] She would travel, she would learn, she would pack a shoebox lunch and take the train to Chicago, or to Kansas City.

- [Louis] Put everything in a shopping bag, just about it, and had a sketch pad and a camera, and it would be the West Coast up to Washington and Oregon, across to Chicago, Denver and so on.

She always went with just a little money in her purse so there'd be no temptation for someone to rob her.

And she looked a little like a bag lady.

- One time she was stuck, I believe it was Kansas City.

She ran out of money.

- So she went to the bank, and she asked to see the president or the vice president or someone, and she told 'em she was Marie Hull from Jackson, Mississippi.

- And asked the man if she could borrow some money.

- And she told him that he could call the governor and the mayor of Jackson, and she gave him the name of the bank and the bank president.

- So the man was very impressed, I'm sure, so he said, "Well, Mrs.

Hull, how much money will you need?"

- She said, "Well, I think $5 would do."

- Well, as much as $20.

- $25, 'cause she had a return ticket.

- So that was really a surprise for him.

He thought she was really wanting money.

- She bought three fried egg sandwiches, and she had one for supper and one for breakfast and one for lunch, and then she went in the diner another time and she ordered potatoes au gratin, and then the waiter said, "Is that all?"

And she said, "That's all."

- And she'd say when the Lord shuts certain doors, He opens others.

And she believed that.

She lived it.

- That was her lifestyle, is that she depended upon providence a whole lot.

- She was a great person, very kind person, very good person, but she was not one to really be that religious.

But all the time, some people were going to church maybe on Sunday.

She was going daily with her art and with her communion with God.

I think she was there every day, not just once a week.

(classical piano music) - [Bess] Marie's house was something to behold.

It was a small house that her architect husband had designed, a little Spanish tile house, mostly hidden behind bushes and trees that she wouldn't cut because she loved all the wild look of the bushes and the trees.

She loved the birds.

When you went inside the door, you were in another world.

The room were she painted, instead of bein' a studio, had turned into being a storage room.

The whole room was stacked with paintings and other things concerning art.

While one little space just inside the door was where she painted, there was a shelf with a telephone and her paints on it.

- [O.C.]

She said she knew where everything was.

It was right where she put it, and she didn't allow anybody, includin' her once-a-week or once-a-month maid, to disturb a thing.

- Well, that's the byproduct of making art, is that you make a mess.

But there was always extraordinary order in her work, and what she did.

- But she did most of her painting about 4:30 in the morning.

I don't know if that's known or not.

I assume that it is, but she used to get up in the wee hours and paint until time for class.

- [Andrew] When she would really get into something, she would start humming.

I even heard a whistle once or twice.

- [Doris] She did very realistic paintings.

She went to Europe and she painted rather realistically, I think.

She came back, I think she was changed in the fact that she started adding more color, and I think the impressionists, of course, impressed her.

Then she went into the abstract school, and even when she was in the abstract school, though, she would still go back and paint these realistic paintings of her flowers in the yard that were absolutely exquisite.

So she could vacillate between the different ones without a lot of trouble, but she kept changing.

- [Marie] I wouldn't wanna pin myself down to one type of painting, one type of subject matter, because if an artist does that, they get in a rut, and the worst thing that anybody can do as an artist, is to copy somebody else.

And it's just as bad to copy yourself.

So if you got into the habit of doing the same thing over and over and over, you'd be copying yourself, and that is not creative.

There'd be no depth, future to anything like that.

- She would occasionally show influences, but she would work her way through it.

But all artists do that.

McCastle said artists have to have parents.

- [Bill] You know, as far as the question of Ms.

Hull adapting other people's styles, I think she was working in a great tradition.

Titian worked from other artists.

He worked from Michelangelo.

That's kind of part of the recycling business.

It makes sense to see work.

That's how you know a work of art intimately is to paint it, is to run it through your own sensibilities, and I think Ms.

Hull can't be faulted for that.

- Now in these three pieces, which are called Mississippi Spring, Mississippi Clay, and Mississippi River, you see some of the last and I think best work that Marie did, which she was pleased to call lyrical abstraction.

And we were talking about this one day, and she pointed out the gradations of color there, and how she was going from the dark colors to the lighter colors, and then I said, "Well, what about these little strokes that are "like raindrops all over the canvas?"

And she said, well, that's the lyrical part of this.

- I don't think she was after fame.

She would not have cared.

She would have liked it, but she wouldn't have cared whether or not she became world-famous in that sense.

She would rather paint, and that's what she was interested in.

That's what was important to her.

- She thought it was very important that a person remain open all their lives, and I think she's extraordinary in having developed a whole new energetic form of expression, which she made her own.

She made it a very personal thing.

- Even when she was a very old lady, she was still thinkin' about the future and new things that she might do as an artist, and she saw things a different way as she got older.

And sometimes those, even in her last years, those things had young ideas in them.

- You know, she was the only artist I knew in Mississippi of her caliber, the only one.

- I remember her most of all as bein' a fine influence on art in Mississippi, the finest type of influence.

- Marie Hull, I think, was a true bohemian in that she cared very little about the traditional mores of society or anything else.

She was individual.

That, of course, that's my description of the bohemian.

- I think the thing that she did that, as far as I was concerned, that was the most important, was that she gave you a feeling for what being an artist was that you took yourself seriously and you took your work seriously, and that it was an honorable profession and something worthwhile to do.

- I think Ms.

Hull's life is a success on almost any level you measure it.

She painted every day of her life, and God knows that's a blessing.

- Well everything comes up pink, of course that was her favorite color.

Maybe everything comes up roses, too.

So that's what I conjure up when I think of Marie Hull is just a great lady, a great pink lady, and a great Mississippi artist.

(classical piano music)