Sharon Butler interviews painter Justine Hill whose exhibition They Just Behave Differently will be on view at Denny Gallery, New York from May 19 – June 30, 2016.

Hill remarks: "I’ve been working on shaped canvases for about a year, playing with this idea and working on ways to break out of the rectangle. I wanted to engage with the wall. It’s hard to get rectangles to interact with the space around them so I started piecing rectangles together and building composite images from separate paintings, I also tried things like drawing directly on the wall. And then I started to pull shapes out from the rectangles, which is where the cut-outs came from. I always defined myself as a landscape painter and when I started using shape canvases, they began to feel more like creatures. I liked that. I felt as though the forms were exactly the same, but changing the format, once they were separated from their rectangular environment, changed the way they behaved. And they moved around more, they had a freedom."