the last exhibition of the year always sneaks up on us. we are super excited to open two new exhibitions to round out 2025 for david kroll and barbara campbell thomas. david kroll is a longtime hidell brooks’ artist. his paintings were included in our inaugural exhibition back in 1998. it has been a pleasure to watch his career from front row seats and every new body of work blows us away again and again. his technique of layers and layers of oil paint built up over months is an arduous task requiring patience and skill honed over years of practice. kroll’s compositions are purposeful and well-thought-out relaying the interplay between the objects. the paintings are meant to be a refuge for the viewer to connect to the natural world. barbara campbell thomas’ acrylic, collage, pieced and sewn fabric on canvas paintings are laborious in a very unique technique stemming from the artist’s family background in quilting. much time is spent laying out the composition while cutting and sewing the fabric onto the canvas. the backs of campbell thomas’ paintings are a blueprint of her work showing the seams sewn in an array of patterns. her current work is focused on housetop quilts using a palette mostly of red and white. barbara’s paintings are very personal through their homage to quilting. just as a quilter would spend hours making a quilt for a loved one, campbell thomas pours as much thought and effort into mapping out every detail of her singular paintings.
david kroll is a still life and landscape painter with studios in maine and in san miguel de allende, mexico. originally from northern indiana, kroll received his bfa from the san francisco art institute (1980) and an mfa from the school of the art institute of chicago (1986). he lived and painted for many years in chicago, where he taught at the school of the art institute of chicago, before moving to the pacific northwest in 2002. he recently moved back east and lives along the maine coast. in his current paintings the coastal views have made an appearance giving his work a defined horizon line. his exquisite rendering of porcelain bowls and vases with birds perched on the edge reflects the ecological balance in all it’s delicate nature.
i paint personal refuges in the form of still lives and imagined landscapes - places to visit for solace, meditation and sanctuary. i work intuitively to create a connection between the viewer and the power of place, the web of life, the idea of nature itself. my approach to still life allows me to work with a number of themes that have long interested me and draw me in again and again. thematically i am interested in the interaction between man – and manmade objects – and nature. in a painted still life these ideas collapse on each other - and raise many questions. which is more beautiful – a rural landscape or a chinese vase? which is more alive, which is more still? is the rendering of an egret or a mountainside on porcelain more or less profound than treatment of the same subject on canvas? is a nest a bowl? is a vase a broken egg? and isn’t all of nature anthropomorphized in the sense that, inescapably, man sees nature through man’s eyes?
i repeatedly place songbirds, koi, and reptiles in my compositions – delicate and fragile, yet purposeful and assured. a bird rests on a rookwood vase. koi swim powerfully in mid-air, above a blue and white ceramic bowl. an egret hesitates before striking a stoneware fish. do these animals care as much as we do about the difference between human objects and the natural world? and what does any of this have to say about what nature is, or the beauty of nature itself?
compositionally the still life allows me to explore contrast – the contrast between foreground and background, between light and dark, between circle and square, between motion and stillness. it also allows me to work liberally with color – the color of natural elements contrasted with manufactured objects.
for these reasons and more i have found the still life form, often incorporating landscape elements, to be a tremendously rich means of expressing my sense of the beautiful and for exploring contemporary topics and concerns that perplex, compel and fascinate me.-david kroll
barbara campbell thomas is a north carolina based painter who has exhibited in museums and galleries across the united states, including the weatherspoon art museum (nc), the virginia museum of contemporary art, the painting center (ny), the atlanta center for contemporary art, the southeastern center for contemporary art (nc), the north carolina museum of art, ortega y gasset projects (ny), maake projects (pa), wavelength space (tn) and hidell brooks gallery (nc). barbara campbell thomas is currently preparing for her first museum solo exhibition, to be exhibited at the susquehanna museum of art in 2026.
her work has been written about in two coats of paint, art papers, the coastal post and BURNAWAY. she has been interviewed on the following podcasts: sound & vsion, seamside, studio break and visual quitters.
barbara campbell thomas attended skowhegan, the virginia center for the creative arts, the elizabeth murray artist residency and hambidge center for creative arts. she is a professor of art and the director of the school of art at the university of north carolina greensboro.
housetop quilts are so named because of the repeated motif of concentric squares, as if one were viewing a shingled rooftop from above. the quilter chooses a medallion of fabric for the center and constructs the rest of the quilt outward in a radiating fashion.
-from a high museum of art collection description of annie mae young’s quilt, “housetop variation”
with her most recent body of work for hidell brooks gallery, barbara campbell thomas settles more deeply into her studio’s conversation between quilting and abstract painting.
the artist’s signature engagement with geometric abstraction and a densely rich surface of paint, collage and sewn fabric are here, but these formal and material touchstones come alive in new ways through a shifted color palette and the artist’s re-invention of a traditional quilt pattern known as housetop.
each of the paintings in barbara campbell thomas’s exhibition started as all housetop quilts begin--with a center medallion of fabric. the artist used a sewing machine to build strips of fabric around that center, gradually constructing the radiating circular shape forming the paintings’ first layer, to which paint and collage were added. but instead of using whole strips of textile to push the composition outward, the artist cut and pieced strips made up of a multitude of colored fabric scraps. a shifting field of staccato fragmentation is the result, calling up microchips, aerial mapping and the big bang all at once.
the housetop paintings engage a new color focus for the artist—largely red and white, offset with orange, grey and black. like her last exhibition for the gallery, which took color cues from a blue hued rag rug made by a maternal ancestor of the artist, these paintings talk with textile history. they speak to the history of red and white quilts, especially a red and white quilt campbell thomas made with her mother as a gift for the artist’s eldest son when he left for college. fragments of leftover fabric from that most personal of quilts are present in these paintings, a hidden tie to love, connection and hope made tangible.
all available work by each artist can be viewed on our website under their individual tabs including sizing + pricing. hidell brooks gallery is by appointment. please call the gallery if you have any further questions.