Stephen Hannock

Stephen Hannock

By Joyce Marcel

Stephen Hannock’s paintings combine landscape with stories — as if there were any landscapes without stories.  Lovely and alive, the paintings flow with rivers and glow with flares of light.

“Decoding meaning is one of the great pleasures of viewing art by Stephen Hannock,” said Brattleboro Museum and Art Center curator Mara Williams. “Each work is exquisitely rendered, suffused with light, palpably beautiful. Each is a thorny, funny, erudite, self-referential riff on living as a contemporary artist.”

Hannock is an art world rock star who hangs out with real rock stars. He is one of an elite group of painters with a waiting list of patrons who want to buy his work. His paintings hang, in among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

He is represented by the prestigious Marlborough Gallery in New York. The musician Sting, who collects his work, is an old friend and collaborator. His friends are a Who’s Who of the art world. He has seven pages in Wikipedia.

So there is no question that Hannock is a verifiable star. The question then becomes, how has the Brattleboro museum managed to get 16 of his stunning, lyrical, story-filled, light-filled paintings, plus two photo assemblages and one print, for display in their latest show?

Thanks for this great gift goes to the small world of notable personages who can be found quietly living in the green hills of Dummerston — and to the good will Vermont has earned after it was trashed last year by Tropical Storm Irene.

Hannock, 61, works nearby in North Adams, Mass., in a series of studios which take up most of the third floor of a restored mill building. In person he is tall, shaggy and as affable as an overlarge puppy. A good-looking man, he’s wildly intelligent and an incorrigible storyteller. He still maintains some of the athleticism and energy of the young hockey goalie that he was when he put himself through several elite boarding schools and colleges.

“He is quite a full frontal personality,” said Williams. “I think he makes beautiful paintings in the classically esthetic sense, and we don’t see that much of that kind of painting. What intrigues me, though, is that his work is also very contemporary and text-based, and he uses unusual techniques to bring them to life.”

Williams titled the Hannock show “Gathering Light.”

“You can’t touch light, but you can see how it coalesces and moves,” Williams said. “His paintings make me feel I’m in the presence of real light even though the paintings are remarkably static. They give you the same sense as when light is actively happening in front of you. They also reflect on art history and the Enlightenment-era concepts of the sublime in nature and beauty in painting. He shows us the ways we are self-referential in this culture, and how storytelling impacts us as a person, a family and a culture. It’s all there. And how great is that?”

Hannock has always had strong ties to this region. He was born in Albany. His late father was an athlete and the proprietor of a string of bowling alleys; his mother was a registered nurse and a photographer.

Hannock’s ability to play hockey eventually brought him to Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Mass., where his first art class was taught by Brattleboro’s Jim Giddings.

“He has a facility with watercolor that I’ve never seen matched,” Hannock said. “It seems effortless. Watercolors are a very difficult medium, and he’s one of the guys who’s mastered it.”

But it was another art teacher at Deerfield, Daniel Hodermarsky, who changed his life.

“He just turned my world upside down,” Hannock said. “He kicked me out of class and said, ‘Just go out and draw.’ These 300-year old boarding schools are notorious for accounting for every minute of your breathing day, and what he said was a big deal. That got my attention, and then I just kept getting ideas that were too exciting to keep inside.”

Hannock soon noticed that there was a remarkable similarity between athletics and art.

“You get excited about something and you execute it; you just move,” Hannock said. “That was fascinating, How do you go from hockey to painting pictures? Having the idea and executing the idea right here, spontaneously and fluently. But of course it requires endless practice.”

Hannock’s next stop was Bowdoin College in Maine, then Smith College in Northampton. There he met sculptor Leonard Baskin, who recognized his talent and whisked him away.

“I got permission to take a season back from hockey to work privately for Baskin, but I never went back,” Hannock said. “Art just took off and required all my focus. Working with Baskin was the best art school  you can imagine, going one on one with a guy who was arguably one of the half dozen great artists of the time.”

After working with Baskin, Hannock lived and made art in Northampton, Mass., where he struggled to get the luminosity he craved onto the canvas.

“I started out by painting in the dark with phosphorescent paint under black light,” Hannock said. “I was looking for something that just glowed and kicked more. Then I heard about this guy doing photographs on light boxes. I looked into that, but transparencies didn’t work for me because I like painting. I’m ambidextrous, and by working with both hands at the same time I create rhythms in painting you can’t get with one hand. Then I was doing a painting of Northampton, and it was just awful, all these resin streaks through the sky. It was dreadful. And a friend goes, ‘You know Picasso always said you have to destroy in order to create.’”

Instead of destroying, Hannock decided to grind the paint on the bad painting down to the canvas and start over.

“After I ground it down with this big hairy tooth sander, ripped it right down to the tooth of the canvas, the piece was done,” Hannock said. “By polishing the paint, by eliminating the globs of paint that arrest light on the surface, you wind up looking through that. I was able to achieve much the same effect as I was getting with the  phosphorescent paint. It allowed me to create depth and luminosity. If you polish down, rip into it so there is no paint sticking off the surface, the wash of white light that hits that canvas — all you see is exactly what was painted.”

The down side of this new technique, he learned, was that you can destroy a lot of work if you’re not careful.

“You have good days and bad days,” Hannock said.

After Northampton,Hannock moved to a loft in New York’s SoHo.

“A bunch of us in New York spent time with art curator and critic Henry Geldzahler,” Hannock said. “He was the godfather of downtown, and he always used to tell us, ‘There’s no such thing as a good idea for a painting or a bad idea for a painting. There are just good paintings and bad paintings. The idea doesn’t mean anything until you bring it to life.’”

Hannock first achieved recognition for a stunning series of paintings he did of the Connecticut River Oxbow in Western Massachusetts — some of them are at the Brattleboro museum. They made his career, but at first he wasn’t happy about it.

“Somehow, I got nailed with this ‘Neo-Hudson River Guy thing,’” Hannock said. “I’m complaining to painter Wayne Thiebaud, a dear friend, about 15 years ago. ‘I’m not this Joe Hudson River School guy. I do more than landscape.’ And he goes, ‘You little punk, just shut up and be glad they’re calling you something.’”

Hannock believes that his large-scale landscapes owe less to the mid-19th Century Hudson River School of painters than to film directors like Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean.

“These directors are notorious for setting the scene with these extra long establishing shot with these huge vistas that are just uncanny,” Hannock said. “They established a mood and set the viewer up for the stories that were about to be told. And I was setting the stages for all these imaginary events to be happening. The people that would come to mind — the friends, the adventures, the family, the stories that I put in my work — wound up meaning more to me than the  topography I was painting.”

Hannock met Sting in the early 1980s when the musician bought a painting and asked Hannock to come out and install it in Los Angeles.

“We just got along,” Hannock said. “We just started getting in trouble together. I think what helped is that I’m not a musician. He’s very competitive, as we tend to be in this cultural arena.”

The connection led to Sting’s commission of a large painting of the Tyne River in Newcastle, England, called “Northern City Renaissance, Newcastle England.” It took Hannock four years to study the history of Newcastle, which is Sting’s home town, and do the work. (http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/north-east-news/evening-chronicle-news/2008/10/31/rock-star-sting-unveils-artwork-of-geordie-roots-72703-22156704/) The original drawing for the painting still hangs in Hannock’s studio. The original painting, still owned by Sting, is in the Laing Museum in Newcastle. A second painting of the same subject is now in Brattleboro.

“It’s a celebration of the recovery of the Everyman of post-industrial cities,” Hannock said. “Newcastle, with coal and shipping, was once at the top of the heap. And in two decades everything closed. It was worse than Detroit. And now they’re bouncing back on the wings of culture. This painting celebrates that.”

Sting is currently writing a musical play called “The Last Ship,” about the last shipyard that closed on the River Tyne. Hannock is doing the stage designs.

Over the years, Hannock has slowly come back to Western Massachusetts. After the tragic early death of his wife, he is raising his 12-year-old daughter in Williamstown, Mass. He bought a home there for his parents, too.

“That was the last time I ever got grief from my dad about being an artist,” Hannock said. “That’s my advice for young artists. First thing, buy your parents a house. Then you’ll never get any more grief.”

Hannock’s involvement with BMAC came about through his friendship with Gordon Faison, who serves on the museum’s board. S. Lane Faison Jr., Gordon’s father, “was a dear friend of mine and the renowned dean of the Williams College ‘mafia’,” Hannock said. “His students are running all the great museums now — the L.A. County Museum, the National Gallery, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. These guys got out of Williams and took off. As a small-world deal, he happened to teach my father.” The museum show is dedicated to him.

Hannock knew about the damage done to southern Vermont by Irene, so when Faison proposed an exhibition in Brattleboro, Hannock was happy to make it happen.

The museum was delighted, even though working with his huge, heavy paintings — some are 6-foot-by-9-foot — strained their resources.

“The increase in our shipping cost alone will break our budget,” Williams said. “And Stephen was like, ‘Take anything you want.’ He made everything come true in a very short period of time. I am thrilled to be able to do this show, but I told our executive director and board, ‘You have to understand that our shipping, security, handling and insurance costs are going to go up. But don’t you dare cheap out on me.!”

They didn’t, and this glorious show runs until October 21.