About

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 in 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, 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 new way.

I look up to the figurative painting tradition that runs through the renaissance to modern times. There has been a revitalization of that tradition in the past 40 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

Faculty Specialties:  Adult classes - Painting, Drawing, Figure,  Portrait, Landscape

BFA Kent State University, Diploma and 5th Year Degree Boston Museum School, MFA Yale School of Art

Ohio in the 50s and 60s was a great place to grow up. Drawing was a big part of my youth; from cartooning to making comic books. I completed an Art Education degree at Kent State University in the 70s. There I discovered my love of painting and the Arts in general. In the early 80s I continued studying painting and printmaking at the Boston Museum School. Later in that decade I earned a Masters at Yale School of Art. It was a time of intense work, meeting famous artists, and many trips to New York galleries and museums. Throughout the 90s I was a member of the Bromfield Gallery and had several solo shows there. I was in group shows at Georgia Tech University and in three New York Galleries. My paintings were reviewed in The Boston Globe, Art NewEngland, and included in corporate collections. From 1994 to 2018 I was a high school art teacher. Over those years I taught Advanced Placement Art and ceramics, organized art exhibits and helped at Art All State, built sets for play productions and helped with drama festivals. It was a very enjoyable and fulfilling career; working with hundreds of talented, energetic teens was a great experience.  During that time I was in group shows at ArtsWorcester, the Sprinkler Factory, and the Montserrat Art College Gallery.  Now I am  retired and happily putting my full attention into painting.

GHancin-Resume