Using mostly oils and rarely extending his painted ground beyond a grown man’s hand span, Gaylen Hansen staples his canvases onto a wall, rips them off when he’s done and considers them finished without frames.
His colors are orchestrated, but he makes a fetish out of flatness. Like Japanese scroll painters, he conveys distance in layers. He paints wolves the color of sage who contemplate a deer drinking in a fish-filled stream. Buffalo, crickets, fish, dogs, cats, deer, bears, crows and magpies
muscle Hansen’s stand-in, the Kernal. When fish play him, he
plays along.
When the sun bears down, he carries an umbrella.
Now 89, Hansen continues to be a bright spot in the art terrain of rural Eastern Washington. He moved there in 1957 to take a teaching job Washington State University and give up on getting anywhere in the art world.
The act of giving up, he said later, freed him to fully inhabit his own experience. His new work on view at the Linda Hodges Gallery is small, with less inflected brush strokes than previously. He has reduced it to its color-struck essence – the wild West as comic still life.
Through March 27.
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