Hollyhocks, Verdant Valley

Description

Artist Statement – Inness Hancock

Inness Hancock uses oil paint and watercolor to develop richly saturated, layered paintings. She uses transparency and gesture to create dynamic, bold compositions that contrast with her subtle and well-defined palette. Her soulful approach communicates connection, solitude, and the human spiritual experience.

“I focus on the natural world as experienced through light and landscape, through the lens of historical information I have access to through familial relationships and through historical texts, iconography, architecture and research. My work keys into the spiritual residue of a place, and challenges what it means to be a place, a location still in existence, or memories formed from experience, real or imagined, by an individual or society. Using abstract language rooted in on-site drawings and studies, I paint my impression of the energy of the place and seek to communicate its relevance to us now. In places of architecture or of nature, I believe the stamp of humanness and/or the human experience of being in that place, can be extricated, absorbed, and realized through color and form.

The framework of abstraction I build upon is multi-layered, including 19th Century landscape paintings, my great-great-uncle George Inness, mid-century women of Abstract Expressionism, as well as artisans throughout history, leads to a highly personalized language of brushstrokes and layering of paint. Through this approach, my paintings develop a rich transparency of color as well as highly specific brushwork, offering structural and formal elements while allowing for new understanding to come forth. I continue to bring this ideal to new large scale oil paintings as informed by smaller watercolor paintings over the last few years.”