Stephen Hannock

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[edit] An American Luminist

Born on March 31st, 1951 in Albany, New York,2 Stephen Hannock is an American painter known for his atmospheric landscapes––compositions of flooded rivers, incendiary nocturnes and large vistas which often incorporate text inscriptions that relate to family, friends or events of daily life. The artist creates his sandpaper-polished, oils on canvas using a signature technique that includes ripping into his paintings with power sanders. Many critics1,6,9,11,12have compared Hannock's paintings to such forebears as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, J.M.W. Turner, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Louis Remy Mignot, among other nineteenth-century masters. Art Historian Jason Rosenfeld, in his 2002 essay Imaginary Realism, Meaningful Contradictions,[1] describes Hannock's work as "both distinctively modern as well as reflective of landscape traditions." And Rosenfeld goes on to say: "Hannock, in his radical technique is a true American luminist. His paintings, multi-layered in both surface and meaning, radiate in a manner that connects past and present..."

The Oxbow: After Church, After Cole, Flooded (Flooded River for the Matriarchs E. & A. Mongan), Green Light[2] (2000)––one of the works that make up Hannock's 1994-2004 Oxbow series––is part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.3 Describing that work on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, Sabine Rewald writes: "Stephen Hannock captured this view of the Connecticut River from the same vantage point chosen by Thomas Cole (1801–1848) for his famous View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836), in the collection of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum." Art critic Grace Glueck, writing in The New York Times4[3], called Hannock's work "Among the more spectacular of the contemporary views" [of the Oxbow]. Glueck goes on to describe the painting as "A rather eerie elegy depicting the scene at twilight, it shows the Oxbow brimming at slight flood and surrounded by shimmering dark plains, heightened by a technique of sanding and polishing each layer of paint." To date, Hannock has painted over twenty Oxbow paintings.

Also part of the permanent collection, and currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the artist's painting Kaaterskill Falls for Frank Moore and Dan Hodermarsky. In addition, Hannock's work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Smithsonian American Art Museum [4], Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, N.Y.; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA[5],; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; and the Readers Digest Collection, Pleasantville, NY. 5 Individual collectors include Sting and Trudie Styler––who own over 20 of Hannock's works––as well as William and Karen Lauder, Meredith and Tom Brokaw, Dick and Betty Hedreen, John McEnroe, and Candice Bergen.6

In 1999 Hannock, along with the rest of the film's technical crew, won an Academy Award for "Best Special Effects" for paintings done for the film, What Dreams May Come, which starred Robin Williams and Cuba Gooding, Jr.7

[edit] Early Life & Education

Stephen Hannock was born on March 31, 1951 in Albany, New York. His mother, Elizabeth, was a registered nurse and a professional photographer. His father, Marshall––who had been an exceptional high school and college athlete––was proprietor of a number of bowling centers throughout New York State. While his mother's artistic eye is a gift that became obvious later, it was immediately clear that Hannock had inherited his father's athleticism: he began playing hockey in fifth grade and continued through high school and into college where his ambidextrous goal tending skills meant he was always sought after as starting goalie.

Thanks to dyslexia, academics had never been easy for Hannock who attended Albany Academy and Trinity Pawling School before arriving at Deerfield Academy, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he hoped a post-graduate year spent playing varsity hockey and improving his grades might ensure his entrance at Bowdoin College the following year. That plan was a success. But Hannock's year at Deerfield proved life-alterating for reasons he never foresaw.

Though he had always enjoyed art, it was at Deerfield Academy that he took his first art class since 6th grade––and was discovered by Daniel Hodermarsky, a man Hannock deems not just the most brilliant of mentors, but "the best draftsman I've ever seen." What Deerfield lacked in visual arts facilities at that time was more than made up for by Hodermarsky's passion. As he expressed to writer and classmate Duncan Christy in the Fall 2006 issue of the Deerfield Alumni Magazine8: "I'd be doing what I do today because if I didn't, I'd go crazy. That's what Hodermarsky instilled in us. The idea that you could be excited by an idea to the point where you couldn't sleep."

Quoted again in the Deerfield Alumni Magazine Hannock says, "For all practical purposes, my life began when I moved to western Massachusetts." Perhaps that's one reason why Hannock lasted at Maine's Bowdoin College only two years, after which participation in the 12-College Exchange Program enabled him to migrate south to his beloved western Massachusetts where he took classes at Smith College and, in 1976, earned a degree from Hampshire College based on work done at both Bowdoin and Smith.

While at Smith College, Hannock caught the eye of sculptor and printmaker Leonard Baskin with whom he apprenticed for several years creating anatomical drawings, woodcuts, sculptures and paintings. He refers to his apprenticeship with Baskin as "the ultimate art school" after which he settled into an abandoned factory in Northampton, Massachusetts and began his life as a working and, sometimes struggling, artist.9

[edit] Early Career • 1974-1984: Northampton, Massachusetts

While studying with Leonard Baskin, Hannock began experimenting with phosphorescent paints, creating large scale, imaginary landscapes that would glow when placed under black lights. These works became the basis for the artist's first museum shows at the Smith College Museum of Art (where he was the youngest artist ever to be given a one-man show) and the Fine Arts Center at the University of Massachusetts.

In Luminosity: The Paintings of Stephen Hannock,9 Hannock's recounts the act of providence that became a turning point in his career. In 1983 Hannock had done a conventional oil painting of Northampton, Massachusetts called New England City (Northampton, Massachusetts) in which glare from the uneven brushstrokes, as he puts it, "completely ruined the mood of the painting." Out of frustration, Hannock "took a rough-grit belt sander" and "sanded the sky right back down to the canvas in order to start all over again." This process of building up layers of paint on a canvas, sandpaper-polishing it, applying new layers of paint and polishing again––sometimes myriad times––is one that Hannock has personalized and perfected over the years.

Living in the Northampton/Amherst, Massachusetts meant Hannock was part of an accomplished art community that included such painters as Gregory and Francis Gillespie, Scott Prior, Nanny Vonnegut, Alfred Leslie, and Chuck Close. It also put him within the sphere of Elizabeth Mongan, Curator of the Smith College Museum, and her sister, Agnes Mongan, who was Director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. For over twenty years this influential pair––to whom Hannock dedicated his painting The Oxbow, After Church, After Cole, Flooded (2000)––lent Stephen Hannock their friendship and their tutelage. They urged him to study art history and its traditions. They also urged him to leave western Massachusetts for New York City.9

[edit] Career • 1984-Present: New York City & Williamstown, Massachusetts

In 1984, Hannock moved from Northampton, Massachusetts to New York City where galleries were awash with "neo" and conceptual works which, at first glance, seemed a world apart from from the landscapes Hannock was creating. Hannock relied on grants from patron Irene Mennen Hunter––along with odd jobs and occasional work as a fashion model––to pay for studio space and groceries. As Hannock says, "It took me two years before anyone would even look at my slides."

In December, 1998, Newsweek featured an article by writer Cathleen McGuidan entitled, Transforming the Landscape11 in which––along with artists such as April Gornik and Mark Innerst––Hannock was spotlighted as one of the "maverick" landscape painters whose seductive works map "a place that feels at once familiar and strange."

By October 17, 2005, Hannock was the subject of a Fortune magazine article entitled, Portrait of an A-List Artist by Andy Serwer.[6] That article includes quotes from a museum director, curator and critic––each with his own view of the artist:

"Because his works are so arresting and immediately accessible, much of the contemporary art world is deeply suspicious of him," says Hugh Davies, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. "They think it's too pretty to be profound. It takes time to realize that there is real profundity and depth to his work."

"What is interesting is that Hannock has defied modernism," says Gary Tinterow, Engelhard curator in charge of 19th-century, modern, and contemporary art at the Metropolitan Museum. "He isn't doing abstract painting, or painting according to critical demand. He painted what he wanted to make. The key to Hannock's work is that it is beautiful. Since the fall of modernism as an exclusive ideology, anything goes."

"Are Hannock's paintings too derivative? Too accessible? Certainly a devotee of the avant-garde would say so. And it's true that neither the Museum of Modern Art nor the Whitney, the two pantheons of contemporary art, have Hannock's paintings in their collections. Several prominent art critics contacted by FORTUNE either didn't want to talk about Hannock or hadn't heard of him. When I explained to the critic Robert Hughes[7] that many wealthy collectors own Hannock's work, he responded, "The taste of the American rich is shit.""

Note: In 2007, the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired one of Hannock's works––Maternal Nocturne: Clearing Storm (Mass MoCA #66-C); polished mixed media on envelope over Chuck Close daguerreotype; 2007.

Since the early 1980s, Hannock's work has been included in myriad gallery and museum exhibitions across the country, including several solo shows.[8] In 1991, restaurant owner Danny Meyer and his partner/chef Tom Colicchio approached Hannock with the idea that he work with architect Peter Bentel on the interior of their New York City project, Grammercy Tavern, which opened in 1984. Their novel idea was that, rather than an afterthought, art could be a fundamental part of the restaurant's design. To date, Hannock has created over a dozen paintings for the team's restaurants, including a huge mural of the Chelsea Highline at CraftSteak on the Hudson River in New York City.

[edit] Personal Life

It was through his work with Meyer and Colicchio that Hannock met his wife, Bridget Watkins, who was PR director and assistant to Danny Meyer. The couple were married in 2000 and their daughter, Georgia, was born in June, 2000. While pregnant, Bridget was troubled by double vision which doctors ascribed to her pregnancy. But the disturbing symptoms continued after Georgia's birth and, on the morning of September 11, 2001––as planes flew into the World Trade Center, just down the street from their apartment–-Bridget received a call from her neurologist informing her that she had a brain tumor. She died in October, 2004.8

Hannock memorialized his wife in a painting that now hangs at Deerfield Academy. Begun while his wife was pregnant, Hannock signed and dated the large, nude portrait of Bridget on 10/10/2004, the day of his wife's memorial service in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Hannock entitled the painting Heroic Woman. As he explained in Heroic Artist, an article by Duncan Christy, "Portraiture is not what interests me. But sometimes you're overcome by an event or an adventure or by a person, and you've got to do that. The life she lived during those three years as a mother, wife and professional...as well as a daughter, sister and friend...was truly heroic."[9]

Today, the artist and his daughter divide their time between Williamstown, Massachusetts and New York City, where Hannock is being closely monitored by Dr. David Abramson for a degenerative eye condition.

[edit] NOTES & LINKS


[1]Atkins, Robert. "Of Luminosity, Accident and Power Sanders: Stephen Hannock Talks to Roberts Atkins." [Exhibition Catalog] Stephen Hannock April 10-May 4, 1996. New York: James Graham & Sons. Introduction by Hugh M. Davies. Text by Robert Atkins.
[2]http://www.stephenhannock.com/bio4.html
[3]http://www.metmuseum.org/Works_of_Art/recent_acquisitions/2000/co_rec_n_america_2001.153.asp
[4]http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E4DF1031F930A2575AC0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pag<br [5]http://www.stephenhannock.com/bio4.html--
[6]http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/10/17/8358074/index.htm
[7]http://www.bowdoin.edu/bowdoinmagazine/archives/features/003584.shtml
[8]http://www.alumniconnections.com/olc/pub/DRF/filemanager/Publications/MagazineFall06Hannock2.pdf
[9]Hannock, Stephen. Luminosity: The Paintings of Stephen Hannock. Introduction by Duncan Christy. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2000.
[10]Belcove, Julie. (May, 1998). Dream Worker. W Magazine, 68.
[11]McGuidan, C. (December, 1988) Transforming the Landscape. Newsweek, 60-62.
[12]Rosenfeld, J. (2002). Imaginary Realism, Meaningful Contradictions. Stephen Hannock. McKenzie Fine Art Inc