Art Hansen

Art Hansen (1929 — 2017) was an American printmaker, painter, and lifelong resident of Vashon Island, Washington, whose intimate prints of Pacific-Northwest landscape and domestic life drew openly on Japanese, European, and American sources. He was born and raised on Vashon, the rural island in central Puget Sound that supplied much of the imagery — flowers, ponds, stumps, hillside farms, and small wooden structures — that would recur across his fifty-year graphic catalogue. He completed an undergraduate degree at the University of Washington in 1952 and went on to a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Minnesota, finishing in 1957.

The pivotal step in his early development was a Fulbright Scholarship awarded in 1953, which sent him to Munich, Germany, to study etching at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste. The European training in intaglio gave him the foundation in line-etching and aquatint that defined his later practice; he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize at the unusually young age of twenty-two for his graphic work. After completing his Munich training and his Minnesota MFA, he returned to the Pacific Northwest, settled back on Vashon Island, and built the studio practice he would maintain for the rest of his life.

Though Hansen worked across etching, hand-coloured etching, color lithograph, watercolor, oils, and pen-and-ink drawing, the dominant share of his graphic output is small-format intaglio: black-and-white etchings, occasional hand-coloured etchings, and a smaller body of color lithographs from the early 1980s. Recurrent subjects include forests and clearings ('Forest, Woodcutter, and Fire'; the dated 'Forest 1974'/'Forest 1975'/'Forest July 1977' sequence; 'Forest and Man on Stump'), garden flowers and still lifes ('Daffodil,' 'Daisy #3,' 'Five Roses 1992,' 'Magnolias'), narrative interior scenes ('Hotel Lounge,' 'Cafe 1977,' 'Four Men in Conversation'), and a long-running suite of meditative pictures of his model and partner Gerda ('Gerda and the Rose,' 'Gerda and the Roses,' 'Gerda and the Tomato Sacks').

The Japanese strand of his graphic vocabulary is well-documented in critical reception. His meditative compositions of natural subjects — ponds, fields, isolated trees and stumps — are often described as recalling Japanese woodblocks in their flatness, their economy of mark-making, and their preference for asymmetric placement and large fields of unmarked paper. The painter and writer Hansen explicitly stated that his sensibility fused influences from America, Europe, and Japan, and his prints have been characterised by gallerists and critics as observing the Northwest with a 'gentle, observant eye' grounded in Japanese-style framing.

Hansen lived and worked on Vashon Island for the entirety of his post-Munich career, producing a continuous stream of small intaglio editions through the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, and remained active into the years immediately preceding his death in 2017. His prints are held by the Rochester Institute of Technology and other regional museum and university collections, and the bulk of his graphic archive is now handled by Gallery No.85 (formerly Davidson Galleries) in Seattle, alongside the Pacific Northwest representation by Khan Gallery in Vashon and Gallery Mack in Seattle. He was a generous and prolific senior figure in the Vashon Island arts community at the time of his death.