The WASHINGTON POST , D.C.
AN ARTIST'S NATIVE
INTELLIGENCE
By Ferdin and Protzman March 29, 1997
Greg Hannan should be the quintessential
Washington artist. His Irish American family has been
rooted downtown for generations. He studied
anthropology at George Washington University, lives
in Shaw, can recount local history not found in any
book, knows every bass hole on the Potomac. But in
his lyrical, austere paintings and poignant, richly
textured assemblages of found objects, there is, to
paraphrase Gertrude Stein, no here there.
Washington supplies some physical material for
Hannan, in the form of objects culled from its streets
and alleys. The city serves as backdrop for the
personal history that drives him. But visually and
emotionally his work has next to nothing in common
with most significant art produced here since his birth in 1950. There is
color but no Color School, abstraction but no geometry, conscious social
commentary but no politics. Metaphysically speaking, Greg Hannan is not
from here.
Of late, that has been almost literally true. Hannan now spends most of
each summer in Nova Scotia, where he has a farm and a small home built
on piles in the Bay of Fundy. His art has also been largely absent. While
individual pieces have appeared in a handful of group exhibitions around
town over the past few years, Numark Gallery's current show, pairing
Hannan's recent work with drawings and prints by Paris-based Edda
Renouf, is his first major local exposure since 1991.
It is a strong show by a unique and multitalented artist. Although he has
little formal art training -- "I took one art course with Bill Christenberry at
the Corcoran School in 1968. He gave me an incomplete.' " -- Hannan is a
fine draftsman, a skilled painter and possesses a Celtic facility with
language. He also has a rare ability to fashion meaningful art from things
he finds along life's highways and byways.
The works on display, priced from $2,500 to $8,000, constitute an eclectic
blend reflecting the artist's wide-ranging interests and talent. The most
powerful piece in the show is "100 Sins," a large, mixed-media assemblage
completed this year in which egg sacs from skates have been numbered
and mounted on small squares of weathered, painted plywood each
bearing a written label such as "Envy," "Calumny," "Spite" and "Racism."
The egg sacs, which are called "Devil's purses," were collected along the
Canadian Atlantic coast by Hannan and his former girlfriend at the
beginning of their relationship and again five years later, just before they
suddenly broke up.
"I had done a smaller study for 100 Sins,' " Hannan says. "When I came
back to do this big piece I had to think about the degraded qualities of a
relationship, the sins of all relationships. To me, that includes behavior and
those aspects that aren't overt. An action can be petty, but another aspect
of being petty is a state of mind, and I think that makes pettiness a sin."
Although they are natural forms, the egg sacs look remarkably like the
demons painted by Hieronymus Bosch or depicted in Pieter Bruegel the
Elder's painting "Mad Meg," from 1562. Each sac is unique, and by
soaking them in hot water and manipulating their tentacles, Hannan has
made them expressively delicate, sometimes even playful but always
ominous, like alluring baubles that pack a toxic sting. There is a wealth of
anguish in the work, and male and female symbols scratched and drawn
on the plywood indicate that some sins were shared by both parties in the
relationship.
"Time to Get to Yellow No. 2," another assemblage of found objects
Hannan completed earlier this year, is a variation on a theme he first
explored in 1983, inspired by a female friend wearing a yellow jump
suit. "I told her she was the only white woman I'd ever seen who
looked good in yellow," he recalls. "And she said, You know, it's taken
me a long time to get to yellow.' "
One half of the assemblage is a painted-over window with a crosslike
divider that Hannan found in Shaw. The other half is an abacus
fashioned with floats from a fishing net as the counters. Hannan uses
the idea of getting to yellow -- a color that traditionally symbolizes
mystical enlightenment, as well as more mundane things like caution in
traffic -- as a metaphor for achieving a higher consciousness. He sees
the abacus, a recurrent symbol in his body of work, "as a parody of
our attempts to calculate what occurs in life."
The major back surgery Hannan underwent in 1995 was a dominant
occurrence in his life and is partly responsible for the exhibition, which
coincides with a solo show at Teplitzky & Scott Fine Art in Cincinnati.
After having part of a disk removed and several others fused,
Hannan had to give up his floor-sanding business. He focused his
energy on art.
"I don't really think of myself as an artist in any traditional sense,"
Hannan says. "My work is strongly narrative. It's about personal
dilemmas and cultural dilemmas. I'm basically a cultural
anthropologist working in another vein. Working on things after the
surgery, I finally felt as an artist that what I was doing was right on
time."
Edda Renouf's small drawings and prints in Numark's rear gallery go
surprisingly well with Hannan's work. A 54-year-old American who
has lived in Paris since 1972, Renouf combines elements of minimalism
and geometric abstraction with a wavy freehand line that gives them
tremendous texture and an almost musical resonance, like hearing
music by just watching the notes dance across the page.
The drawings are particularly appealing. In "Field 9 (Grasshopper
Series)" from 1995, Renouf uses thick, fibrous paper, incised and
drawn lines and brown pigment in a simple composition that conjures
up such natural images as a field full of insects as well as scientific
notions that suggest an instrument plotting the grasshopper's song on
graph paper.
link to article:
Washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/an-artists-native-intelligence
TIME TO GET TO YELLOW, 1997
found wood, Styrofoam 63” x 82” x 5”