Stephen Hannock - The Luminescent Diary of a Unique American Artist

Images of the Connecticut River conjure up memories of childhood for me. In the summertime, my family would drive from New York to New Hampshire crossing the Connecticut River in the early part of our journey. Then later, we would meet up with its wilder relatives, the tributary rivers Ompompanoosuc in Vermont and finally the Ammanoosuc in New Hampshire. In addition, my parents were great fans of the Hudson River School painters and Thomas Coles' Oxbow (the distinctive view of the Connecticut River near Mt. Holyoke Massachusetts) was a favorite. I liked this picture too, it turned a familiar river landscape into a kind of end-of-day, nostalgic revery.

I was fortunate to be in Verona when Hudson Hill's beautiful new monograph of Stephen Hannock's work was on press. Hannock is particularly known for his luminous paintings of views of the Oxbow, which refer back to the same scene by Frederick Church and Thomas Cole. I was on press with publisher Leslie van Breen and designer/art director David Skolkin as they painstakingly saw sheet after sheet of the book's jacket which depicts this famous landscape. There is this particular blue-green-yellow-gold glow in the sky that had to be just right ....

I love Hannock's drawings, too, of his travels around the world, of his friends. And I like the way, in some paintings, he includes long passages of handwriting that - from a distance - meld into the landscapes and add this subtle entryway into the artists thoughts, dreams, unconscious.


The Oxbow, After Church, After Cole, Flooded, Green Light. By Stephen Hannock. Currently at The Metropolitan Museum of Art