James Hilleary

James Frances Hilleary (January 21, 1924 – April 10, 2014) was a working architect and painter who gained prominence as a member of the Washington Color School movement.

[3] After graduation, Hilleary went into the private practice of architecture and remained a principal at his own firm until joining Rysson Maryland Corporation in 1976.

[11] Early in his career, the art critic Barbara Rose lauded Hilleary's "assured geometric abstractions" in an article in Artforum magazine, while The Washingtonian called his work "particularly promising".

"[2] His signature style revolved around his "interest[] in patterns as well as colors—patterns not simply as decorative displays of color, but as on intricate arrangement of what the Futurists called lines of force.

Washington Post art critic Benjamin Forgey observed that Hilleary "at first adopted the then-reigning hard-edge format utilizing relatively subdued optical color combinations" but over time his work evolved to show a "gradual release of lyrical energies, in which softer colors and thin, translucent overlays of paint have been added to the logical structure of interlocking vertical and diagonal stripes.