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Paul Hannon comments on his work:
My paintings evolve out of my appreciation for the environment as I find it. This includes the rugged, worn, rusty, funky and unplanned aspects of things as they are. I paint representationally with a careful eye to light and colour. I enjoy exploring phenomena in search of the elements that compose my work. The weathered shacks, the winding roads, the backs and fronts of signs, and the views of places somewhat out of balance are all fascinating to me. I enjoy exaggerating perspective, flattening out space in panoramic map-like views, and I invite the viewer to take a few moments to travel these roads with me. They lead to fictional places, taken apart and re-assembled to become metaphors of coastal places, cityscapes and roads.
My sense of light is Northern. It's low angled with lots of long, dark shadows. My sense of colour is that I respond to vivid colour and feel that it needs to be balanced with more subtle and darker shades to find a place in my paintings. Literally, the bright colours play on deeper grounds. The scenes that I depict have sparked me in some way. They have woken me up and I view that as an invitation to explore the motif in paint. That moment of inspiration leads me to my exploration of my imagery through drawings, preferably in pen and ink. I became familiar with the image and find my affinities to the elements that inhabit my studies. Removing things, changing things, editing and emphasizing are part of the process of creating pictorial effect. The drawing structure finds its way to the canvas and gives me a skeletal framework onto which I can build colour. Areas are established and changed. Areas are painted in and painted out. I'm finding that these changes add a great deal to the sparkle and surface interest of the canvas. I like to find contexts for the bold colours to find a way to belong in the painting.
I have really only one strong experience that guides my vision as a painter and image maker. Ordinary objects, and ordinary places can be very beautiful when the lighting is great. This happens everywhere. My imagery reflects an appreciation and response to this kind of light.
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Gold Light
The following is a review of a Paul Hannon exhibition held at Secord Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia in November, 1998. It was published in the Shambhala Centre Banner, December 1998. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author, Denault Blouin.
Gold Light
By the time you read these words, Paul Hannon's exhibition of new paintings at the Secord Gallery will be gone, just like the impermanent, everyday world in much of his work. And that's where the power and - to use that dangerous word - beauty of his images stand. Dangerous because the commonplace is so often trivialized by sentimentality (Rockwell) or nostalgia (Parrish) in re-presentational art. Presenting the ordinary in the instant of its perception involves letting the world speak for itself so that what "we" usually take for granted shines unexpectedly bright and vivid - as if seen for the first time. That brilliance infused Paul's latest work.
Of course, there's the light in the paintings too: that kind of gold glow - with a slight rose wash in it - that comes at dawn (or sunset, or after a storm) and is quickly gone: that gold that casts the objects of the everyday world into their essential value, briefly: the gold of impermanence, to use a contradiction in terms.
And probably the ability to hold contradictions in balance is where the gentle, soft, lusciously colored power of Paul's work comes from. Also, from underneath those seductive surfaces (which are pleasure enough, indeed) - from the bushwhacked architecture of his compositions: those shacks, "deconstructed" (his word) fishing villages, and (im)possible landscapes which reveal a sense of design so deft it almost slips by in a sly twist on the picturesque.
That twist is part of it too - a gut deep sense of humor and play that'll put two sources of that old gold light in one painting, tip buildings on edge, sink 'em into the ground, or drive a car down the middle of the road to West Dover. That kind of stop to look twice/thrice fun.
Actually, much of this work demands stopping altogether because what it depicts has already ceased to exist. These works are moments of perception caught, like out of the corner of the eye, or car window: that very light lavender-grey sky above the Nova Scotia Power Tufts Cove smokestacks in "Commuters"; that house by the road with eggs and dodge parts for sale; the sun-drained Kit-Kat corner store sign in "Early Tuesday Evening" light - Tuesday, not Monday, that precise.
And, as if all this were not enough - the light, the color, the form, the precision, the sense of humor - there is, last, the rugged tenderness of this work. Take that painting of apple blossom branches. Forget that rich royal blue background, if you can, just take the branches: they're immediate as Spring, like Sung or T'ang brush painting, but in North American color with a Van Gogh-like intensity of brush.
Whoa now, wait a minute, you might say, bringing old Vincent into this gets risky. Right? Yes, and that's, I'd suggest, one of the colorful shadows on the gallery wall we're up against here. And some other artists too. Like Edward hopper in love with the Sunday morning ordinary, but without Hopper's impending American darkness looming at the picture's edges. Or Walker Evans' photos of things as they were in 30s/40s/50s/ - you know, love, simple love of what is, the eye without bias. Or even R. Crumb in Paul's crazy little pen and ink flower pot watercolours.
Comparisons such as these are not drawn lightly. This is rich, significant work, grown from our own ground.
It could deepen further. With people. Putting people in scenes such as these is very risky, because of the subject matter itself, which plays off the conventional realist scene painting edge where people are props not actors.
But look at what a difference a person makes to the big painting, "Harold Weaver's Shed." There's only the back of an older man in suspenders and a broad-brimmed hat (Harold Weaver Himself?) going into his shed, which is backlit by sun fall on a wall of those old fat diamond asphalt siding shingles and a crooked, handmade, handpainted Javex blue ladder casting complex shadow. But what that man adds is story, and that story enhances the whole, adds presence, an inhabitant, not just an observer. Making this small move in a painting, in art (period!), is very difficult, because it is the touch that joins heaven and earth and boosts the power of the work into steady-state greatness. That takes daring.
Paul's work already dares a lot, and succeeds, Daring further, upping the ante, adding story is a risk worth taking. As it is, done right, here, that gold light'll get you every time. It comes straight down from the old masters (and back beyond). Let people live in it. Now.
D. Blouin
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