(Fair Oaks, California, 1968 - )
Heather Hanson is a visual artist whose drawings, paintings, and prints explore motivated perception and the Romantic sublime. From the American West, her practice holds a mysticism that resides in objects, landscapes, and narratives. Hanson looks closely at synchronicities in daily life, assigning them esoteric interpretations, guided by a phenomenological impulse to search for signs.
Recent work, "The Atmosphere is Sentient (The Hudson River)", extends this inquiry to the meteorological and the atmospheric. Informed by the Romantic and Hudson River School traditions, historical and contemporary, she examines the sky as an active participant in experience. Hanson approaches weather not as a backdrop but as a conversant presence, capable of reflecting and shaping human emotion. The project also considers the atmosphere as a living system, responsive to climate shifts and human impact, where subtle changes in light, air, and water reveal larger patterns of environmental transformation. The process combines plein air studies, photography, and studio-based drawing in graphite and charcoal, worked reductively with alcohol, sandpaper, and erasers before refinement in point and brush.
Hanson holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art, and a BFA with Distinction from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Colorado, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, India, and Colombia. Her work is included in permanent collections nationwide. Hanson divides her studio time between New York and Colorado where she continues to explore the atmospheric, the poetic, and the sublime through a practice rooted in observation, ecological awareness, and imagined reciprocity.