July Portfolio: Stephen Hannock

Stephen Hannock in his studio.

One day in the 1980s, painter Stephen Hannock took a power sander to a canvas he was struggling with and ground away at the pigment. He was only trying to strip away unwanted paint, but when he was finished, Hannock had created a surface that captured light with subtle and luminous beauty. The technique established the artist as an heir to the 19th-century landscape paintings of Thomas Cole and the other artists of the Hudson River School. But sanding was only the first of the happy accidents to shape Hannock’s emerging aesthetic. Some time later, he was using an old envelope to soak up excess oil on a painting so it would be ready to sand more quickly. The scrap, smudged with paint, dark with type and translucent with oil, had a magical surface. “What I saw on that envelope,” recalls Hannock, “was considerably better than the painting I was working on. It touched off a whole appreciation of the concept of palimpsests, different layers of stuff on top and beneath the surface.”

Before long, Hannock was writing on his paintings, and embedding photographic images into his sweeping, panoramic views. At a distance, his paintings look like traditional scenes of rivers, mountains, or city skylines. As you approach them, though, they envelop the eye in layers of visual and textual interplay. “A canvas is just as close to dead space as you’re going to find,” the artist says. “These layers of meaning have added to the adventure of painting.” Born in Albany, New York, and educated at both Bowdoin College and Smith College (as part of an inter-college exchange program), Hannock’s work has joined the likes of Thomas Cole and J.M.W. Turner in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and other major institutions. His exhibit, “Luminosity: Paintings by Stephen Hannock,” is on view at the Albany Institute of History & Art now through September 2. A sampling of Hannock’s preliminary paintings (some of which employ digital photography) are at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, through September 3.

STEPHEN HANNOCK ON HIS WORK

Thomas Cole’s influence

Cole is a reference point for me. I lived in Northampton [Massachusetts] when I first started painting, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and his painting The Oxbow, of the Connecticut River, has a huge presence in that area. Over time, I noticed that he’s got a self-portrait in the picture, waving back to the fans. I wanted to answer that vista, to paint that place. I went up to an area that was the launch for hang gliders, and just imagined myself being 400 yards off the cliff. That’s where the original drawing was done from. Characteristic of all my compositions is that I don’t have any foreground. So here I have this oxbow [The Oxbow, after Church, after Cole, Flooded, 1979-1994], but I’m not having any hillside where Cole is waving to the fans. At the same time, the concept of the palimpsest had become really evident to me. I was trying to figure out how to claim this land, and I just started writing on the painting, right through the cornfields: “Gordo the wacko almost blew Jimmy’s head off with an M-80 right here on the riverbank.” This real-life activity. It became very clear that the people I had known, family who came to mind while thinking of this area, were so much more important to me than the topography. The topography was the excuse to hang the light. The people were the amazing thing. The canvas became a kind of diary, all these stories of people as they affected me. So the paintings are, in that sense, self-portraits.