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.