Best Painting Solo — Representational

Nationally known Colorado artist John Hull likes to mix Hollywood-style shoot-’em-up imagery with traditional painting techniques; taken together, his cyclical narrative pieces could be called visual novels. In Pictures From Sonny’s Place, Hull told the story of an imaginary rural junkyard — based on an actual place in Wyoming — where meth is used and dealt. The story is filled out with tough guys and their wild girlfriends, a bunch of hot cars (some of them wrecked) and even a gun or two. It’s an ordinary story in the impoverished countryside nowadays, but in Hull’s able hands, the tale was epic.