I am an observational painter, I greatly enjoy painting from life, and could be called a plein air painter. To look at a motif and have your hands fall into sync with your eyes is a magic experience. The dynamic interaction of focused looking and its recording creates its own type of meditative high.
The past many years I have been concentrating on urban, suburban, and rural landscape painting. I have been exploring how light, time, and seasonal changes describe a place and set mood. I am interested in how architecture, cars, street signs, etc. interact with the natural environment. I am fascinated with commonplace neighborhoods and the subtle strangeness they can evoke. I try to balance these narrative and representational issues with formal ones like color, surface, and mark.
I try to stay away from traditionally picturesque motifs. I look for locations that are more unique and personal to me. I’ll walk or drive about my town and try to let my mind wander into an introspective place. It will be in these solitary moods when I see these normal places in a fresh and innocent manner. When I am in such a mood; the light cascading across a lawn, the shape of a shadow, the color on the back of a mailbox is fascinating. It’s these moments I try to capture in my paintings.
For the past few years I have occasionally surrounded my paintings with wide decorative frames. They are intended to isolate and glorify these normal places and to show that a normal place can have aspects of the sublime. The decorative motifs surrounding such American places, hopefully creates a conflict that has people looking at these places in a fresh and new way.
I believe my art is in the progressive painting tradition of western art. I look up to that figurative painting tradition that runs through the renaissance to modern times. There has been a revitalization of that tradition in the past 30 years. One can look back to the Bay area painters and Richard Diebenkorn as the beginning of this movement. Fairfield Porter is also seen as a grandfather of this category. Stanley Lewis, Rackstraw Downes, George Nick, and too many others to mention have been labeled as new realists. A possible definition could be an artist that is working in a realistic manner but is aware of contemporary art and is responding to it in one way or another. I try to do that and be true to my own ideas and vision.
George Hancin