Gaylen Hansen: Two Decades of Painting
Review by Alec Clayton published in Art Access, November 2001
Note: When I went to Linda Hodges Gallery in Seattle to review the Gaylen Hansen show, I had no idea the paintings I was going to see would affect me so strongly. I opened the review with an unqualified rave such as I seldom if ever use, to quote:
I love Gaylen Hansen’s paintings. In more than a quarter century of writing art criticism, I don’t think I’ve ever been so affected by an artist’s work. I had a chance to preview some of the work that will be in “Gaylen Hansen: Two Decades of Painting” at Linda Hodges Gallery, and I did not want to leave the gallery.
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| "Contortionist"
by Gaylen Hansen oil on canvas, 1991, 60"x72" photo courtesy Linda Hodges Gallery |
Hansen is among the more well known painters in the state of Washington, but I had never before seen his work (it's embarrassing to admit this since I've been writing art reviews in Washington for about seven years now and have no excuse for being so unaware). His kind of folksy-comic style is not unique, but he does it better than most. There is solid painting and design behind his strange images. I want to say much more, but too much verbiage may serve only to dilute the impact of his art. Go see it when you get the chance.
Here's
the review:
Hansen’s work is well known in Washington, but being an
East Coast transplant, it was new to me. How to describe these marvelously
tragic-comic paintings? They are the love children of Phillip Guston and Susan
Rothenberg, with a few chromosomes stolen from Robert Crum. Hansen creates his
own fantasy world – a world incubated in the Wild West – and he illustrates
that world with a visual acuity toned by years of working as an abstract
painter.
His world is a world of strange animals that are as scary
as they are funny. There are noble wolves, and there are nasty wolves with comic
leers right out of “Little Red Riding Hood,” wolves that seem to epitomize
all the stereotypes, but with a wink, as if they are saying to us, “This is
what you think I am.” There are monstrous cats no sane person would dare
attempt to pet, and there are fish and insects that take over the world. And
through it all rides Hansen’s alter ego, The Kernal. With his mountain-man
beard and his corncob pipe, The Kernal is like the shepherd who watches over
Hansen’s fantasy world. Or, perhaps more accurately, he’s an emotionally
detached Lone Ranger who merely watches the bad guy rustle and rob. And I have
to add that although The Kernal is Hansen’s obvious alter ego, I suspect that
all of his non-human creatures are also alter egos, perhaps expressing different
aspects of his psyche.
If the inventiveness and uniqueness of his narrative is the
thing that draws people to Hansen’s paintings, it is the abstract qualities of
color, design and mark making that make them work.
Hansen’s colors are wonderfully dull, dry, brittle and
chalky. His green tones are the green of dry moss and pea soup. His red and
orange tones are like rust and dried blood. His whites and grays are like
weathered signs and sun-bleached wood. His use of line and brushstroke serves as
a unifying element, and his design is classic.
In the new book, “Gaylen Hansen” by Vicki Halper,
Hansen’s design strategies are described as either “monumental form” or
“allover dance.” The former is
described as having “strong images with clear contours, often centered.” The
design principles in these “monumental form” paintings partake of structural
devices used from the Renaissance on up through Cubism. In the latter,
“brushstrokes are looser and cross the contours of his forms. Clear focal
points may be lost.” In these paintings marks such as spots on an animal or
eyes and teeth may be repeated as gestural marks on the ground that create a
kind of camouflage. Figure and ground pop in and out in a frenetic dance across
the surface of the canvas. And, of course, there is not always a clear
difference between these two design strategies; often elements of each are used
within a single painting. Two examples should suffice as illustration:
“Contortionist” is a painting of a man and a wolf
caught up in a strange face-off in front of a brick wall. Each bends over with
head between legs, and faces the other in a bizarre kind of mooning. The man is
a clown with a bulbous nose. The wolf stares him down with a toothy leer. The
forms are clearly defined in the center of the canvas, with a linear arrangement
that locks them together like two pretzels. The overall color is a
brownish-orange brick red, with a few splotches of a dull blue in the wall. The
man’s pants are a darker blue, and the most intense color in the painting is
the cobalt shadow that looks like a throw rug linking them together. (An almost
identical structure is used in “Man Leaning on His Tie,” which I saw only in
reproduction in Halper’s book.)
In “Leaping Cat and Rising Fish,” a voracious cat seen
head-on leaps forward to meet the rising form of a fish. Between them is a dull
red tongue that can be seen as belonging to either creature (Do fish have
tongues? Is the cat licking her chops?) It is a large painting (60 x 72 inches),
and both fish and cat are monstrous. The colors are mostly a dull green, black
and white, with touches of red. Typical of his “monumental” designs, the
figures are placed in the center of the canvas, but this painting is more of an
“allover dance” due to the way figure and ground merge. Staccato
brushstrokes wander from figure to ground, and sketchy eyes and teeth float on
the ground.
“Gaylen Hansen” by Vicki Halper was published by Linda Hodges Gallery and released by University of Washington Press, and will be available at the gallery during the run of this show.