A viewer of my paintings wrote to me recently and had this to say, “Your landscapes are so evocative, for me so emotional. You have a gift for portraying more than realism in your landscapes-not something fantastical, but something simultaneously approachable and not. Not everyone will do what you do, but so many of us are deluded or ambitious enough to aspire to.” This very generous and kind statement describes exactly how I would hope that my art is received by those who view it. I try to live up to this ideal with each painting.

Marc R. Hanson

     One of the reasons that I’m a visual artist is that it has always been more effective for me to share my excitement about the natural world through visual means, painting or drawing, than it has been through writing or speaking about it. My love of the land, the Midwest in particular, and my desire to communicate that deep seeded love is what drives my work. Painting is the vehicle for my expression of that love. My purpose is not to replicate the specific or dwell on the spectacular, as much as it is to
observe the specific and to discover the beauty in the seemingly unspectacular. My goal is to paint a sense of place and what that means to me as an artist.

     My most recent work has been to create large landscape paintings, as large in scale as those painted in the studio, entirely on location. Some of these paintings are completed in one session, others are completed over a longer period of time lasting several sessions. The challenge that working from life in this way presents is overridden by the benefit to my understanding of light and color on the landscape, and the authenticity that it brings to my paintings. I foresee my art continuing to move in this direction, major works mostly completed on site.