Ally Hilfiger hosted a friends-and-family opening for her first solo art show Thursday night at The Georgian in Santa Monica, Calif.
Tommy Hilfiger and wife Dee Ocleppo Hilfiger, Georgia May Jagger and Douglas Friedman were among the guests who stopped by to celebrate “Imperfect Harmony,” on view in the updated Art Deco hotel’s Gallery 33 until April 29.
“‘Imperfect Harmony’ to me is about embracing and accepting all that we are as humans…different emotions we go through as a mother, as a woman, the layers of guilt we experience, and how we break free from the guilt we hold onto through our lives,” said Ally Hilfiger, who starred in the reality show “Rich Girls” when she was a teen, and who wrote the 2016 book “Bite Me: How Lyme Disease Stole My Childhood, Made Me Crazy and Almost Killed Me.”
“It’s my medicine,” she said of painting, pointing to the breaking-open flowers and pushed-together shapes on the canvases around her, as manifestations of her feelings. “When it comes out, I can process it and I can start to let it go.”
She began painting right after 9/11, she said. “My uncle was dying of cancer, my parents were divorcing….So I got some canvases and just went,” she said. “It feels so good.”
During COVID-19, she started her “Lifeline” series, from which one painting was on display. “I was feeling overwhelmed and unsettled, and the only thing I could do was paint the lines. The undulation of the pain on the paper represented the undulations of our emotions throughout the day.”
“We’re very proud,” said dad Tommy Hilfiger. “We have some of the originals. We were there during the beginning,” he added of her artistic journey. “It’s helped open her mind and coping with stress.”
