H Craig HANNA

When H. Craig HANNA was an art student in New York in the 1990s he craved something more permanent than the performance art and installations of his peers and discovered that in order to move forward, he had to look back. At a moment when figurative drawing was considered old fashioned, Hanna instinctively knew that he could learn from observing Great Masters like Velasquez, Sargent, Titian, Rubens or Rembrandt. He honed his personal style by grasping the rules, then breaking them. The results of H. Craig HANNA’s rule bending are paintings that are deeply grounded in his exquisite draftsmanship and sensitivity to color, but which live in our own time.
H. Craig HANNA’s desire to create contemporary art with traditional skills led him to experiment with painting in ink on Perspex, an unconventional technique that he brings to maturity in his monumental recent works. There is no room for error in this fluid medium – the inks dry very quickly on the plastic – necessitating extensive preliminary studies in charcoal, pen, pastels and oil paint before he dips his brush in the ink and applies it to the verso of the Perspex. The deceptively chaotic application of ink belies H. Craig HANNA’s profound understanding of the figure perfected by years of drawing from life and his ingrained balance of color, which he combines to produce deep emotion within his compositions.
Claire Van Cleave, art critic