Painting is my exchange with a vital and restless world.
David Hanes work begins outdoors with hand-held observational sketches made on site from his travels: imprints of light, colour, atmosphere, and energy. He carries these sometimes for years, filtering them through distance and time before transforming them in the studio into colour-driven oil paintings. Shelters, horizons, forests and skies — motifs he keeps returning to, not out of nostalgia, but out of concern. In this way, the paintings are not reproductions but recollections of marks, rhythms, moods, and the pause between then and now.
His work begins outdoors with hand-held observational sketches made on site from his travels: imprints of light, colour, atmosphere, and energy. He carries these sometimes for years, filtering them through distance and time before transforming them in the studio into colour-driven oil paintings. Shelters, horizons, forests and skies — motifs he keeps returning to, not out of nostalgia, but out of concern. In this way, the paintings are not reproductions but recollections of marks, rhythms, moods, and the pause between then and now.
Through devoted looking and patient making, painting is how he inhabits time, sitting with the world long enough for something to declare itself. The ordinary becomes electric. The still begins to move. Working across intimate and large formats, his paintings are dwelling-places that hold a felt weight of being alive: grief and hope, loss and longing, suffering and curiosity. All existing together.
His work carries an awareness of early Expressionist groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, the Group of Seven's relationship to the untamed landscape, and a lineage of colour-driven painters from Munch and Seurat through to contemporaries such as Daniel Richter, Andrew Cranston, and Sky Glabush.