Mr. Hitch was born in Lincoln, Neb., in 1940 and attended the University of Nebraska, where he earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in 1964 and a master's in 1968. By then he was already living in New York, evolving an engaging style that merged modernist geometric abstraction with the saturated stained colors of Color Field painting and infused the hybrid with a light streetwise insouciance.
His natural touch and distinctive sense of color earned him a strong underground reputation. His early paintings concentrated on four- or five-pronged star shapes that evoked hastily sketched corporate logos. Subsequently his forms broke apart and multiplied, borrowing from graffiti art, Abstract Expressionism, fabric design and whatever else caught his eye.
He received grants from the Tiffany Foundation, the Gottlieb Foundation and (twice the National Endowment for the Arts. His first gallery exhibition in New York was at the Robert Freidus Gallery in SoHo in 1975. He also had solo shows at the Harm Bouckaert Gallery in 1983 and the Jack Shainman Gallery in 1987.
(taken from obituary in New York Times, Feb. 18, 2002)