Flowers

I first made it back to my studio in June of 2020, I spent the previous 2 1/2 months mostly at home, mostly drawing flowers so when I first got back I started painting flowers....they make me happy calm and serene, just right for where we are at now...

 

Non - Alignment Pact

Oil on Canvas 24 x 30

 

I'm Not Perfect.....

I've been revisiting some of the themes that fueled My 2019 Marlborough Project Room, the relationships between cartoon characters...

I'm Not Perfect 24 x 30 inches Oil on Canvas

 

Time For A New Self Portrait...

At the beginning of the pandemic I shaved my beard off so that a mask would fit better......it took 4 months but it's grown back and I thought I would paint that....

 

A New Bluto

I Took one of the painting from my last show, a project room at Marlborough contemporary here in NYC and reworked it.....I find myself more and more interested in the area between representation and abstraction...

 

Painting Flowers

Since I first made it out to my studio during the pandemic, the last week of may....I've been using this period to experiment, making a wide variety of paintings, various subjects and various styles.....the one subject I keep coming back to is flowers.....I's such a confusing, contentious time.....I just want the simple beauty of flowers in my home, I want to look at them and soak up their beauty...

 

The Best Educated First Lady In History...

I loved making this painting of Michelle Obama

 

At The Beach

 

1933

Oil painting 36 x 36, I'm trying to loosen up and combine techniques, making fightclouds with a palette knife, the motion of the painting action adding to the motion depicted

letting Loose

Happy, Oil on Canvas, 12 x 16

3 Men

I combined a couple of different figures that I have painted separately, into a beach scene.......this one is 24 x 36 oil on Canvas

Sugar Sugar

24 x 36 Oil on Canvas.....I've been looking back at the fighclouds that I've done in the past and reimagining them.....

Mark

I found a Canvas 24 x 48 in my studio building, it had a 3/4 portrait on it and I thought I would try painting one of my own, I've always liked the 3/4 and even the full length format as used by Whistler and others but I' feel like I could only make the face interesting, I wondered how to make the rest of the body interesting.....so I thought of my friend Mark, he has been HIV positive since the mid 1980's and very out and proud of that. I've also been looking at the paintings of Elvira Bach lately and I love how she paints bodies.......

Trying Something New...

Sammy's Beach 2  16 x 20 Oil on Canvas...

I have been looking at Milton Avery Beach Scenes lately and thought I would try one myself....I’m not sure when I first became aware of the work of Milton Avery. They must’ve had some at the Minneapolis Institute of arts in the Walker Art Center which was one of my favorite places to ride my bike to as a teenager. 

But when I was in New York I got to spend some time with an Avery at a clients house. During my second stint at college at Columbia University school of general studies I was employed and taught for the school of bartending the student voting agency and one of the clients who hired me regularly was a psychiatrist and his wife who had an apartment in the 60s and had a small Avery on the wall. I asked him about it he explains at the Museum of modern Art used to have this kind of rental or try before you buy program and so he picked out the Avery and brought it home and lived with it for a little while and decided he wanted to buy it so that’s how we ended up owning it and they entertain quite often I understood their idiosyncrasies and I like them and they liked me so I got to spend a lot of time with the Milton Avery painting and I’ve always aspired to Avery‘s kind of simplicity there’s so much content there with so few brushstrokes I’m sure I was thinking of Avery as I painted this

Listening to Francoise Hardy on a Rainy Friday Afternoon

I love painting flowers, It's such a calming soothing experience and feels great in this day and age...I almost go into a trance when I do it.....I love that! This is Oil on Canvas 18 x 18 inches

Palette Knife Paintings...

When I was a little kid I loved the work of Bernard Buffett, I still do even though he's not so well thought of, when I mention my Fandom sometimes think I've gotta be kidding... but I'm not and this is how I've been using that love...One of the cool things about using the palette knife is that my self critical voice gets turned off and I enter something like a trance,,,,,,,it's like I leave the room

Back to Bluto

I spent Most of 2017/18 improving my painting skills by keeping the subject matter the same, the cartoon character "Bluto.... I thought I'd try another one... this one is 12 x 16 inches

Wild pea

A friend posted this image on insta.....(I'm supremehanson there) and I asked if I could use it, I really enjoyed making this small 8 x 10 oilpainting yesterday, 

Sunflowers In a Vase by Philipe Malouin

I loved making this painting because it was so challenging! To make the yellow sunflowers pop from the green background took a lot of experimenting but I loved the results, the vase designer liked it too!

Studio Wall.....works in progress...

My first exposure to oil paint was at a manikin factory in Long Island city in the summer of 2002. I got a job painting faces on manikins, it was a great job and I really liked it and I learned a lot  but it took me six weeks before I made one they could use but once I got it I got really good.

The way I got the job was in an AOL M4M chat room And I got a message from a guy saying “I see in your profile that you were an artist do you want a job in a manikin factory?” I was working at the Museum of modern Art and I knew that job was going to end soon and I would need another job so I said “sure” his response was “it’s the Drybrush method can you do that?”

I said sure so he gave me an address in Long Island city and told me to show up Monday morning at 7:45 AM it wasn’t a problem because I’m an early riser did though seem a little weird but I should just show up at some factory in Long Island city but it also seemed like something I should pursue so I went there and he gave me a palette with some oil paints on it  and a baby manikin and some brushes and told me to paint. I was pretty nervous and I did a pretty bad job but he looked at it and said I had some talent and I would be able to pick it up. So I went downstairs negotiated my hourly rate,  filled out all the paperwork to join the union and punched the time clock......and  this kind gentle man kept giving me lessons but I wasn’t picking it up,  it was really frustrating I just couldn’t figure out how faces were put together.  Every day on the subway I would stare at people,  look at their faces and  look at all the details how they combined then I get into the manikin factory and I try and replicate what I saw and it was close at times but always a little bit off I remember one time I gave a baby eyebrows that were too big and my boss yelled at me saying the baby looked like Joan Crawford.

I remember the day I finally made one that could use,  once I got it I got it and I kept at it and I became pretty good and as I was doing it I realize like oh I bet I could transfer some of the skills to a canvas and it wasn’t until around 2008 long after I left that job that a friend asked me if I could paint his portrait I said sure, So I my friend sent me a photograph of himself cropped the way he wanted it and I did a pretty good job of painting it but he didn’t like it. My then current boyfriend was traveling a lot to the far east for work and he was away for long stretches of time so I started to make paintings of him and they were pretty good. 

An ex-boyfriend‘s dog had recently died and so I painted her and that turned out really good he bought it so I made another painting of her from the same photograph it was different and it was good too.... so I made paintings of myself I had a photograph that I really liked that my friend boyfriend to take care of me and Fire Island and I made a painting of it and really liked it the next day I made another painting from the same photograph and it turned out really different but I liked it to the third day I did the same that one is quite different but I liked it to so I spent the summer Painting Portraits of people and dogs . 

I asked a friend of mine who worked at a very nice gallery if you would come over and take a look at them he came down to my basement studio sat down in a chair looked at the wall and said “dogs and men with beards, dogs and men with beards” I didn’t realize my scope was so narrow so I started painting women and babies and I got a few commissions and I kept at it I really enjoyed it but I didn’t exactly figure out how it worked with my previous bodies of work and I kind of bothered me and then I stopped thinking about it and just kept at it..

Joao

This painting came from a photograph in a friend's Instagram feed. It’s something I started doing in 2016 I would see a friends new haircut or a beard style or some odd lighting and I would download the photo and make a painting of it just out of curiosity.

Usually I see something that I feel would be a challenge that I’ve never painted before and then I’m curious to see if I can paint it, I'm learning as I go along....

My first exposure to oil paint was at a manikin factory in Long Island city in the summer of 2002. I got a job painting faces on manikins, it was a great job and I really liked it and I learned a lot  but it took me six weeks before I made one they could use but once I got it I got really good.

The way I got the job was in an AOL M4M chat room And I got a message from a guy saying “I see in your profile that you were an artist do you want a job in a manikin factory?” I was working at the Museum of modern Art and I knew that job was going to end soon and I would need another job so I said “sure” his response was “it’s the Drybrush method can you do that?”

I said sure so he gave me an address in Long Island city and told me to show up Monday morning at 7:45 AM it wasn’t a problem because I’m an early riser did though seem a little weird but I should just show up at some factory in Long Island city but it also seemed like something I should pursue so I went there and he gave me a palette with some oil paints on it  and a baby manikin and some brushes and told me to paint. I was pretty nervous and I did a pretty bad job but he looked at it and said I had some talent and I would be able to pick it up. So I went downstairs negotiated my hourly rate,  filled out all the paperwork to join the union and punched the time clock......and  this kind gentle man kept giving me lessons but I wasn’t picking it up,  it was really frustrating I just couldn’t figure out how faces were put together.  Every day on the subway I would stare at people,  look at their faces and  look at all the details how they combined then I get into the manikin factory and I try and replicate what I saw and it was close at times but always a little bit off I remember one time I gave a baby eyebrows that were too big and my boss yelled at me saying the baby looked like Joan Crawford.

I remember the day I finally made one that could use,  once I got it I got it and I kept at it and I became pretty good and as I was doing it I realize like oh I bet I could transfer some of the skills to a canvas and it wasn’t until around 2008 long after I left that job that a friend asked me if I could paint his portrait I said sure, So I my friend sent me a photograph of himself cropped the way he wanted it and I did a pretty good job of painting it but he didn’t like it. My then current boyfriend was traveling a lot to the far east for work and he was away for long stretches of time so I started to make paintings of him and they were pretty good. 

An ex-boyfriend‘s dog had recently died and so I painted her and that turned out really good he bought it so I made another painting of her from the same photograph it was different and it was good too.... so I made paintings of myself I had a photograph that I really liked that my friend boyfriend to take care of me and Fire Island and I made a painting of it and really liked it the next day I made another painting from the same photograph and it turned out really different but I liked it to the third day I did the same that one is quite different but I liked it to so I spent the summer Painting Portraits of people and dogs . 

I asked a friend of mine who worked at a very nice gallery if you would come over and take a look at them he came down to my basement studio sat down in a chair looked at the wall and said “dogs and men with beards, dogs and men with beards” I didn’t realize my scope was so narrow so I started painting women and babies and I got a few commissions and I kept at it I really enjoyed it but I didn’t exactly figure out how it worked with my previous bodies of work and I kind of bothered me and then I stopped thinking about it and just kept at it..

This became Lemonade

I was done working on a big painting, the painting I had planned to make in my studio that day. It wasn't quite taco time nor was it time to leave, so I picked up my phone and started scrolling through instagram,  a designer that I like, Philippe Malouin,  posted a photo of a half lemon on a plate he designed. It was beautiful and I'd never made a painting like that.......so I picked up a little canvas and dipped my brush into the colors I had on my palette and started painting without thinking about it. Pretty soon it was Taco Time so I set the brush down and called my painting done. It's not perfect but there is an exuberance and liveliness to it that I really like.....it looks and feels alive. I didn't plan it out, I just did it and it feels to me very much about a moment in time, like a record of that moment. 

Thinking cumulatively, everything I make was made in a specific moment in my lifetime so my entire body of work is a record of my life, I like to think of it as a record of the talents that the universe has given me and me becoming more and more comfortable with using them.... Getting out of my own way and turning down the volume on the voices who told me "You will never make it as an artist.....", "Maybe painting isn't your thing", "You can never be a success because you come from a broken home", "You didn't get a degree from the right school, you're not qualified" "You havn't read the right theory books, you're going to be found out...." etc etc etc....

My first solo show was 40 years ago and my last solo show was at Marlborough contemporary in NYC in 2019, neither of those events were accidents and if I was truly faking it I would have been found out and kicked out of the art world a long time ago but those voices never go away, they are a part of me and they fueled every single confident brushstoke in this painting and for that I express my gratitude to the universe and I embrace every single defect of character and all of my imperfections, they got me to where I am today and I'm grateful to be here....

Dior

My neighbor Regina has this amaing little dog named "Dior" and in this pandemic times one of my joys has been meeting up with neighbors to exchange baked goods or in this case to visit Regina and her dog Dior....this oil painting is 12 x 9 inches and it was a joy to make!

Summertime Flower Paintings

I've always liked flower paintings, Fantin-Latour and Manet made some of my favorites, here are a few of my own

Cyclamen

My Neighbor Fred bought me this plant in early May, it was really weird but the color was great especially when I photographed it with a flash, so one day I decided to make a painting from the photos and that was pretty exciting.....I'm going to keep going with this and see what happens, these are 12 x 12 and 12 x 16, I'm going to try some larger ones....

Teaching Myself how to paint....

When I was awarded a residency at Cite des Artes in the winter of 2006 I had three months to do whatever I wanted to do, in Paris....They gave me a studio next to a pianist and it had a great big paint splattered easel in it. The building itself was on the Seine facing Notre Dame but I was in the back of the building facing a large snow covered garden, it was beautiful! My live/work space was a white room with black curtains, so already I had two musical references going on there.

I walked a few blocks over to the Pompideau to see the Dada show. I remember being impressed with a Francis Picabia paining of a circular form with some words below it and his initials on the upper right hand corner, then I headed over to the Margiela boutique and as soon as I walked in they picked the needle up off of the opera record and put it down on “A Song for Europe “ by Roxy Music It began “
here by the Seine, Notre Dame casts a long lonely shadow “ I was kind of blown away that this song by my favorite band, that I first heard when I was 15 was forecasting the life I’d be living 30 years later. I figured that was enough content for a painting so I headed over to the art supply store and bought a blank canvas, paint and a palette knife.

I had been making drawings of a spiral that came out of me as I played a recording and the Picabia painting reminded me of one of my spirals so I bought black and white paint to make it look like a drawing and Paris got me thinking of Bernard Buffet’s palette knife paintings, So Finally I made a credible painting...

Gratitude

This whole Bluto project came into being very organically. I decided to give myself a year in the studio doing whatever I wanted to do each and every day. it wasn’t about coming up with a concept and executing it, it wasn’t about being critical before during and after... it was just about making what I wanted to make, for me. I made mistakes,  I came up with some very unsophisticated solutions and I learned that I was pretty talented, and I learned to own that….

 It turned out to be an opportunity for me to learn how to paint and to learn how to believe in myself on a whole deeper level, to believe that I am enough. It didn’t matter that I didnt go to the right school and that I never properly learned how to paint, I had amazing teachers in Minnesota who got me started and I continued learning rules and technique by trial and error over the course if my 40 year career.  On the Bluto work I was just painting the way I wanted to paint, with no formula to follow.  I’ve looked at a lot of paintings and I’ve seen a lot of styles that I like and I’ve felt a lot of particular painters hands in their work, and I wanted my paintings to look very handmade like they’re a record of the time that they were made, a record of their own making. And they were about Bluto but they weren’t about Bluto.  My childhood fascination with that cartoon character was a motivator but then using my adult faculties and going back and watching the cartoons I realized there was a lot more going on in them then I might’ve been aware of as a kid, one particularly fascinating aspect of it was the constant flipping of the good guy bad guy role, Both Popeye and Bluto are very versatile. This helped drive home the point that we are all capable of good and bad and very few of us are 100% one way or another. So it was a very productive two years,  it allowed me to fully and deeply forgive myself, to finally believe that I truly am enough .... and once you’ve forgiven yourself it becomes a lot easier to forgive others. Unburdening myself of all the resentments I had been accumulating and carrying around was a really nice gift to myself…thanks Bluto for Helping me learn that…..

Bluto The Surreal

Saturday I sat down at my kitchen table not knowing what I would draw, and I came up with this 12 x 9 in Drawing, Bluto's beard used to be mine, It's my hair

This one is called "Mighty Real " 12 x 9 inches

Movin' On Up 12 x 9 inches

Studio walkthrough March 8, 2017

Beard - I used to have a great big beard and I cut it off so that I coul...

Some friends on facebook started a page called Isolation station where we all do 7 minute drawings and post them. All kinds of people have been posting....artists and non artists alike, it's a very level playing field and I love that, it is supremely satisfying to make these drawings, it keeps me sane! There are more on my instagram channel Erik Hanson

Getting Started- Drawing Some Flowers

All I want For Christmas....Is You...

Oil on Canvas  24 x 30 "

Obviously there's a lot of desire going on these fights.  This image is loosely based on a still from "Blow Me Down" from 1933 and the fights are really beautiful in the cartoon's, clearly these guys who drew them were genius' but they go on for a really long time, far longer than they need too, maybe these guys just want to spend time together and that's the way real men did that in 1933...

Hank

This source material was a cartoon of Bluto with both of his eyes closed so I opened one of his eyes and painted it in the style of a mannequin eye that I learned how to paint when I was employed in a mannequin factory in LIC in 2002. That's where I initially learned how to paint realistically and I'm grateful for that job as I could not afford art school and never finished college. I wanted to make this painting as an hommage to that job and I named it "Hank" as a reference to Henry Miller who inspired me as a teenager to follow my heart's desire. When I was 8 years old I told my working class parents that I wanted to move to NYC and be an artist when I grew up, they told me it would never work as you have to come from a wealthy family to be an artist and frankly I'm glad they told me that as it just fanned the flames  burning inside me and increased my drive to carve out a career for myself as an artist.

Evidence

Oil paint over a pre-existing commercially produced, thickly textured, horizontal painting of Calla lillies. I was thinking about the way Sigmar Polke and David Salle overlay seemingly disparite images and this was an opportunity to try that.

March 22

So exactly 2 years ago, March 22, 2018 I was taking the subway home from my studio where I had been painting Bluto all day and I looked up and Bluto was sitting across from me staring at me. I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to ask him to pose for me or ask him on a date but I was too dumbfounded so I pulled out my camera and took a picture he stared right at me and didn’t look away..This painting is just called “March 22, 2018” 18 x 24 oil on canvas. It has been hanging in my living room ever since...

Bluto Poseiden

This was kind of a breakthrough for me in my project of teaching myself how to paint. I started painting Bluto in January 2017 as a way to teach myself painting ( I didn't go to art school) By keeping the subject matter the same it allowed me to try all kinds of styles..

Construction

Oil on Canvas 24x 28

I started this shortly before my last show "2 Years of Bluto" Opened, I figured I already had enough works completed for the show so I went looking for random snapshots of strangers who resembled the cartoon character I had painted and I was surprised that I was able to pull this technique off and that these more realistic works looked great next to the flatter cartoon charater paintings, I recently reworked the painting, addressing issues that I initially found too challenging...

Someone, Somewhere (In Summertime)

Oil on Canvas 24 x 28 Inches. I'm trying to find ways to make the Bluto/Hank character that I have been painting more 3D...

Beatnik

10 x 30 inches January 2020