The Art of Seeing Nature Through Gaylen Hansen’s Eyes
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
The key protagonists of Gaylen Hansen’s many paintings and works on paper are the wildlife that surround him at his rural home in Palouse, Washington, the eastern part of the state near the Idaho border: dog, cats, magpies, grasshoppers, and the occasional buffalo. Like Wayne Thiebaud, who often focused on his California landscape, both urban and rural, David Bates, who painted scenes in the Southeast, and Roger Brown, who painted scenes in the Midwest, Hansen focuses exclusively on the Northwest region.
Hansen has a long and extremely productive career, he is now 104, born in 1921, has been painting since 1939, and has focused on the life and character of this region of America.
From still life to landscape, Hansen has portrayed the myriad nature of nature: forests, mountains, flocks of birds, pools of fish, and all with the keen eye of a determined and passionate observer who chronicles his life through the images he collects and events he portrays, living in this very rural environment. In bright daylight or under moonlight, the landscape is his preferred setting. Broad views or close-ups, he documents from observation and memory, his life in a manner similar to the personal observations of Philip Guston, and like Guston, using a rich painterly style that looks at his life as a template, a reflection on both the craft of painting and the necessity to translate his life into art.
Astute pictorial comments on the life of animals: how they live and behave, traveling in groups, hunting at night, exploring the land, or crowding a stream. There is both delight and humor in what he sees and paints, and as he has said: “If fish could fly, these’s what they would like.” Hansen himself appears as the kernel, a dweller of the land, an observer of the countryside, a rider on a horse, a knight, or a cowboy, the artist transformed into his own fictive character to play here and to be a kind of auto-portrait of his artistic life, a life that started on a farming northern Utah where he excelled at horse riding as he rounded up horses and cattle.
Animals have been the subject of much of Modernist work: Franz Marc's mystically colored horses, Braque’s noble birds, even Giacometti’s bronze cat. Today, Hansen combines the representational approach to his flocks and herds, but also imbues them with a sense of strength and forcefulness. His portrayals are always dynamic in appearance: living, active creatures, no matter the species or size. Dog and Moon, 2001, is a beautiful and elegant presentation of Hansen, the romantic, seeing his old pet outdoors against a bright full moon, an elegant composition of black and white.
Fish, 1999, or School of Fish, painted in the 90s, are great examples of his portrayal of wildlife in rich and vibrant colors. Each painting, whether in dark tones or sharp color, is a bold statement and affirmation, in fact, about what he sees and cherishes and wonders at the constant life around him.
Many of Hansens’ works are large presentations of still life elements: paintings as if we are looking in at the artist’s work table in his studio, on which we find a teapot, a few small spheres and cubes, tools, and a jar of paint. Another classic is Still Life with White Teapot, 2000, a tribute to the art of the Italian master Morandi, an artist Hansen greatly admires. These still lives are formal in composition and classical in temperament, opposite the more expressionist mood and style of his views of nature. What he likes about these still-life works is that the possibilities of arrangement are seemingly endless.
Yet, both modes of work are contemplative, always thinking through what he sees and depicts. His career has kept him working in the Northwest, though he was shown in 1979 at the New Museum in New York and had representation there with the now-defunct Monique Knowlton Gallery.
A reviewer in 1981 wrote about the work: “Paintings that are, in other words, witty, eccentric, iconoclastic, free-spirited, fun-filled, and truly delightful.” He goes on to say, “What makes it more wonderful still is that Hansen's art evolved on the West Coast, in Washington, to be precise, and that he has had very few dealings with the art world as such. What this proves is that if the talent and creative imagination are there, an artist doesn't need the hotbed atmosphere of a major center to find his voice, or to establish its cultural relevance.”
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Michael Klein, Owner & Director at Michael Klein Arts, LLC
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
Photographs courtesy of the artist and Woodside/Braseth Gallery.
