Lynn Hanson Essay
#21 Susan McDonnell (Visiting Painting)
#22 Lynn Hanson (Response Painting)
When I first saw the "visiting painting" of the monkey sitting in the tree in the Rousseau-like jungle, I was charmed. There were signs of humans in the wild setting but they appeared to be benign, even loving.
My first impulse was to paint a darker more realistic vision, a burned clearcut rainforest. But the message I was getting from the painting was of a peaceful coexistence, perhaps even connection. How to pass that hopeful message along using my preferred bleak colors and often cursed subjects?
After some rare angst over this throw down to make a different kind of painting, I concluded that you can’t return flesh to the bone. Plundering the sources close to me, the Pacific, the Santa Monica Mountains, my wild cottage garden in Venice, and then distilling and translating those experiences with charcoal or my dismal palette of oils, has become my language.
So I received the message and passed it on, employing the crows, my omnipresent companions. Just today, rolling along on my bicycle in the early morning sun, I whispered to one of the great black birds prying carnage from the asphalt, “You are a great beauty.”