Marc Hanson – About the Artist

A viewer of my paintings wrote to me recently and had this to say, “Your  landscapes are so evocative, for me so emotional. You have a gift for portraying more  than realism in your landscapes-not something fantastical, but something  simultaneously approachable and not. Not everyone will do what you do, but so many of  us are deluded or ambitious enough to aspire to.”  This very generous and kind  statement describes exactly how I would hope that my art is received by those who view  it.  I try to live up to this ideal with each painting.     One of the reasons that I’m a visual artist is that it has always been more  effective for me to share my excitement about the natural world through visual means,  painting or drawing, than it has been through writing or speaking about it.  My love of  the land, the Midwest in particular, and my desire to communicate that deep seeded  love is what drives my work.  Painting is the vehicle for my expression of that love.  My  purpose is not to replicate the specific or dwell on the spectacular, as much as it is to  observe the specific and to discover the beauty in the seemingly unspectacular.  My  goal is to paint a sense of place and what that means to me as an artist.     Typically my work is painted on location during all seasons of the year.  The  paintings created on location are painted on a smaller scale in oils.  The smaller scale of  these paintings allows me to capture those fleeting moods, and quickly changing light or  weather effects.  I’ve painted this way, en plein air, for many years now, and have  completed many, many hundreds of these studies.  Most of these small paintings are  painted either on linen or primed board and are completed in one to one and half hours.  The studies represent my immediate reaction to the subject matter and are a record of  that short period in time. Just as importantly, they build an enormous library of visually  recallable information that is indispensable to me in the studio.  When working on larger paintings in  the studio, studies and the memory of the time and place are  invaluable to me and form the basis for much of my studio work.  My most recent work has been to create large landscape paintings, as large in  scale as those painted in the studio, entirely on location.  Some of these paintings are  completed in one session, others are completed over a longer period of time lasting  several sessions.  The challenge that working from life in this way presents is  overridden by the benefit to my understanding of light and color on the landscape, and  the authenticity that it brings to my paintings.  I foresee my art continuing to move in this  direction, major works mostly completed on site.