Véronique Plesch – Moving Paint, Writing Memories: A Conversation with Stephen Hannock

Artist Stephen Hannock has many ties with the State of Maine, starting with his having attended Bowdoin College and continuing to this day with his on-going collaboration with Camden-based Two Ponds Press. The connection with the press’s proprietors, Liv Rockefeller and Ken Shure, was through one of the most important figures in Hannock’s life, Leonard Baskin, with whom Hannock apprenticed and for whom Shure worked as agent for his Gehenna Press. The Farnsworth, which owns Hannock’s Luminous Lakes below the Knife Edge, Mt. Katahdin, Maine, is planning a forthcoming installation on the occasion of the United States Semiquincentennial, for which artist and designer Anneli Skaar will help create didactic panels explaining the text that is embedded in the depiction.

In my “Art Historical Musings” in MAJ’s fall issue (“Making, Thinking, Learning”), I had the occasion to briefly discuss Hannock’s work. Last summer, in preparation for an essay I was writing for a forthcoming monograph, Stephen and I spoke at length about the presence of words in his Vistas with Text series (that he calls his “diary”). As a contribution to this issue’s theme of “Words and Images,” here are some excerpts (edited for length and clarity) from these conversations.

VP: Stephen, when did you start writing words in your paintings?

SH: With the Smith College Oxbow, my very first one. I was very aware of the painting that Thomas Cole painted of the Oxbow; it’s just a couple of miles from the Smith campus, where I was in the early 1970s and worked with Baskin in Northampton until the early 1980s, when I moved to New York, where I stayed for thirty years. What happened was that I was haunted by this Oxbow and I’d see Thomas Cole painting it and waving at the fans. But he never lived there! See, I lived there for seventeen years, so I wanted to reclaim it. Also, I wasn’t wild about the mood that painting gave; I thought I could make a better painting. I’ve been slammed for saying that, but, come on, what painter doesn’t think they can do better than the painters who’ve come before? That’s why we do this. There’s an image that I see in my head that is much more moving to me than the one that Thomas Cole painted. And I’ve done that, once, twice—now it’s up to probably forty [paintings of the Oxbow].

VP: But, nevertheless, the fact that Cole had painted it was important, otherwise you wouldn’t have painted it.

SH: That was the motivation and that’s when I put my diary in it. You know, this is where Claudio got in a car accident, this over here is where Smith Glass & Mirror was . . .

VP: So, what about memory? You want to talk about how memory plays into that?

SH: it’s all memory!

VP: It’s quite clear that, as you’re looking at a landscape, you’re thinking of Thomas Cole, so it’s the memory of a past work of art, or you think of someone, so it’s memories of times you’ve experienced with them. But for what purpose are you recording those memories?

SH: Well, the memory arrives as a spontaneous thing. When a given memory has an impact that moves me to a certain extent, that creates the motivation to put it in the painting.

VP: That’s my question: why put that memory in the painting?

SH: To share it, to express it, and to celebrate it. To let them know that they’re in my painting, even if they passed. Lane Faison [S. Lane Faison, professor of Art History at Williams College] is in a lot of my paintings. There’s an event that’s in a lot of my Oxbows, something I call “skating beneath the ice aprons.” That happened when I was living in Northampton, the Oxbow had frozen over, and we went skating. There was a thaw and the water level in the Connecticut River lowered about four feet and then refroze. And there were these aprons of ice around every tree that were left from the previous height of the river. You could go underneath them and it was mind boggling.

These things are very organic and they’re fluid. The things that come to mind as the material painting is formulating are fascinating, and I want to just let them go. I can’t get too introspective on how that happens because it gets in the way of making the art.

VP: It’s running through you as you’re painting.

SH: Absolutely. You are haunted by these events as you’re moving paint. And sometimes it gets to the point where you’ve got to write this down. Oh, man, this is where so and so happened and so forth and so on. And that’s how they build up.

There was a major gallery that was interested in having a show of several big pieces (each takes me a year to do). And they said, you do the painting, and we’ll hire assistants to write the text in there. It was heartbreaking because not only did they not understand what was happening while the painting was being made, but worse, they didn’t care. They just wanted a vista with the writing on it so they could sell it and get the next guy in.

VP: It’s awful because not only does it have to be the ideas that come to your mind as you’re painting, but, on a literal level, it wouldn’t have been your own handwriting.

SH: The rhythm of my handwriting and the rhythm of the way the paint is applied, regardless of the tools I’m using, and regardless of whether it’s left-handed or right-handed [earlier in the conversation, Hannock told me he’s ambidextrous], there is a calligraphic rhythm to that.

VP: There’s also the way the text is placed in relation to what’s painted: you’re not just writing in straight lines; you are interacting with the landscape.

SH: I’ve tried that sometimes [writing in straight lines], and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work. A lot of it has to do with whether you’re writing on a land that is moving away from you or on a cliff that is facing you; then you must handle the text differently.

VP: That means that when you’re writing, you’re really thinking about the topography. You’re not just writing on your painting; you’re writing on the landscape.

SH: Oh, absolutely, you’re writing on the landscape. But the point you bring up that is really curious, is that with the collaged images that I’m now using (I’ve only been doing that for a few years), it’s almost like I’m illustrating the text after the painting; the landscape is there, then the stories arrive, and these images help out the stories.

VP: Would you say that the text is a response to the landscape as you’re painting it, and the collaged images respond to the text?

SH: Right. What I’m doing now is I have the text that tells the stories, then I back away and I find the rhythm in the paint that will allow me to put a collaged image with minimal covering it up; I’d like to have that image there without any interference to it. And often it means it’s on another side of the painting from the text. But that brings us back to the point where this is one cohesive idea, and ideas are scattered through the whole thing. The painting is an entire object that ignites my imagination to these stories. And I put the stories where they fit and when they happen. It’s very spontaneous.

I have found that images help people get into the text. People tend to look at the letters and the words strung together as painted gestures. I’m hoping the didactic panels we’re going to make [for the Farnsworth Katahdin] will encourage people to look a little deeper.

VP: Some of the texts refer to the place, but, very often, they have nothing to do with it, unlike names on a map, which refer to the rivers and the seas and the towns. I mean, when on the Farnsworth Katahdin, one reads, “Phong Bui + Paula Lunder,” it’s because you’re thinking about them, right? But then in some pictures, you write, “this is …” [or “this way to…”] and then you’re referring to places.

SH: I do both. Sometimes I write about the topography and sometimes about the people that come to mind, but, more often than not, I have a more enduring emotional response to the people and adventures I’ve had with those people than to the topography.

VP: How do you expect the viewer to experience your paintings? Because first, you see the landscape, and given the scale, you must look at your works from a distance. Say, you enter in a large gallery, and there’s Katahdin, and it’s a bird’s eye view, so you’re looking at the landscape from above. And you come closer and that’s when you realize there’s text. So, what are you expecting the viewer to do with that text? (After all, the 2026 Farnsworth exhibition will be the first time that you’re going to provide the backstory.)

SH: I have to confess that for years, my answer to that would have been, I want to leave this entirely up to the viewer’s imagination. For fifteen years or more, I would go into the Metropolitan Museum and hang out with the guards, watching people come by my paintings and discover the text. What I naively expected was that people would spend more time reading them (and you can read these things with very rare exceptions). What I naively expected was that people would do some sort of research to find out the story behind that.

For a number of years, the Metropolitan Museum hung my twelve-foot Oxbow piece perpendicular to my Kaaterskill Falls piece, which is nine feet high. And I painted on such a large canvas because all the treatments I saw of Kaaterskill Clove or Kaaterskill Falls by the 19th-century painters were parlor paintings. They were small paintings—I’m sure sales had something to do with that, or space to display them—but it’s a 300-foot-high waterfall, and to do this in a thirty-inch-high piece just seemed crazy. So the size was initially in total respect for the geological place itself, but then it also provided all this surface to write so much more than what I was able to get into the flat plane that went off in the distance of the Oxbow composition.

VP: What about the scale? Given the very large canvases, the bird’s eye view, and the absence of foreground, that ends up being a very immersive experience. And when you’re really immersed in that environment, you forget the one you’re in. Isn’t a successfully illusionistic work of art one that makes you forget the world you’re in?

SH: That’s what we hope. We artists want to attract an audience. We want to give the viewer a moment that they’re thoroughly unfamiliar with, and one that holds their interest to the point where they will discover things on their own. And the more art that people look at, the less they feel, “there’s one meaning here, and I got to figure that out.” We’re creating an environment that will take you out of wherever you are and whatever you want to remove yourself from. The painting allows that environment for you to take off. While I’m painting that environment, creating this mood, that’s when these situations that involve other people come to my mind. Celebrating those people is important to me. And that’s where the text really comes through, and that’s why they’re mostly diaries.

 

I wish to thank my research assistants, Lucy Preston and Victor Sabbatini, for their help transcribing the recordings of my conversations with Hannock.

My essay “A Place Haunted by Words: Space, Time, and Memory in Stephen Hannock’s Vistas with Text” is forthcoming in Stephen Hannock, Moving Water, Fleeting Light (Williamstown, MA: The Artist Book Foundation). Two Ponds Press is also preparing a book on Hannock’s depictions of Mount Katahdin.