HI! I'M HANNAH
I’m a painter and illustrator currently living in Los Angeles, California. I grew up in Ohio, but attended art school from 2006-2010 in California, which is what brought me out west to where I am now. I am currently a full-time studio artist.
I have produced several large-scale murals across the US, and also produce a wide range of work for a variety of clients in education, tech, food, and more. I’m currently sponsored by art suppliers such as Liquitex, Holbein, and Trekell Art Supplies, and my painting videos have been featured by LADBible, Bored Panda, Create Magazine, Juxtapoz, and more in the past several years.
While I mostly produce artwork in my studio in Los Angeles, large-scale work has become a passion of mine in the past five years. I have shown work in galleries all over the world for the past decade, and the ability to now travel to create site-specific work has opened up a new creative window for me. Being a full-time artist means I wear many hats, from running an online store to creating videos and social media content, but painting is my passion and the opportunity to work big is always so exciting. Stretching your legs and working at scale is an awesome break from producing in studio.
My personal art style is defined by technique in application and dynamic color, and is blocky, pixellated, and bright. My work usually represents animals, human features, or objects up close, broken down into interpretations of light and color. My paintings are designed to exist carefully between mechanical and fluid, representational and abstracted.
I currently live and create in Highland Park, CA. I've got two rescued rabbits that live in my studio and watch me paint, and my time outside of work is spent cooking, tending my succulent garden, traveling, and exploring my city.
MY ART STYLE OVER TIME
I've developed my personal art style across 15 years of honing, studying, and refining.
When I learned to paint, I worked entirely in oils and watercolor. Along the way, I picked up some bad habits-- over-blending instead of learning to mix colors, muddy values, and poor visual hierarchy. In an effort to learn more about color and to fix some of my mistakes, I took up acrylic in 2010 to force myself to be more deliberate with my painting process.
When I began, my work was blobby. Over time, it became more graphic and angular. I've gone through many phases of experimentation over the years, which has ultimately lead me to the work I produce today. Here are a couple of examples of the evolution of my style.
2013
When I began with acrylic, I was using it the way I had been trained in oils-- lots of subtle marks, and an emphasis on the image as a whole rather than the markmaking. I was still working on canvas rather than wood panels that I use today, so some additional texture was present.
2016
Over the next few years, I began to treat brushstrokes as individual marks. These paintings are more "decorative" than representational. I experimented a lot with symmetry and subtle palettes in this time. Much of the work felt neutral, grey, and subtle.
2019
Over time, my work became cleaner. Marks tightened up, and the pieces became less noisy overall, with a better balance of detail versus breathing room in the works. Bolder palettes, dramatic compositions, and higher contrast became my emphasis, but the individual marks were still rough.
Today, my work emphasizes hyper-clean shapes for an almost digital feel.
Individual brushstrokes are applied carefully and perfectly flat, to reduce the natural beading properties of acrylic. This means almost no texture is present in the work at all-- rather, the paintings feel delicate in their application. No shapes exist without purpose and thought.
The tightening of my style over time has brought me new textural challenges-- since my work is designed to be somewhat minimalist, I spend a lot of time considering efficiency and intention when I approach a piece, especially for non-organic subjects.