Colors and shapes aid artist’s creations

It wasn’t until Lynn Hanley was in college that she chose to be an artist. Raised in a blue-collar family in Detroit, she had initially chosen chemistry and science as an avenue for financial security.

Then one day she stumbled upon an art history book and saw a photo of a painting by Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky. “When I saw it, something moved inside of me,” she said, “I changed my major to art in my junior year.”

Hanley graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit with a bachelor’s degree in fine art in 1971. She worked as a detailer, technical illustrator, and artist for General Motors Corp. and then as a graphic artist for Ragen Information Systems. From 1989 to 2000, she taught art and film at Gettysburg College.

During those years, Hanley taught art on the side, including working with children of women who were victims of domestic violence. For that effort, she received a Volunteer of the Year award in 1996 from the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence. She also created an exterior mural in Detroit, paintings for the President’s Council on Women for Gettysburg College and paintings for the cover of Cream City Review, in Milwaukee.

Hanley created sculptures first, flowing figurative abstracts in wood, stone, clay, cast bronze, Plexiglass, and exotic materials. While she still sculpts, painting allows her more freedom of space and time.

In 2000, Hanley moved to the Nine Mile Falls area. She has taught at Spokane Art School and does classes and workshops at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture. This month, Hanley has also been teaching a mandala workshop at the Providence Center for Faith and Healing at Sacred Heart Medical Center because she believes art can heal.

Kandinsky (1866-1944) once said that “color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, and the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.” Hanley agrees, believing that color and shape can cause change in a viewer through enveloping radiance.

Hanley strives to create paintings that contain luminosity. “First, I sketch in pastel chalks,” she explained. “The colors flow, blend, dissolve and create different shapes. Images from land or sky or both are usually the bones of the composition. To translate those forms and feelings into paint is another matter. To create luminosity in that medium I use very thin washes of oil mixed with turpentine and glaze the surface, using complementary colors. These amorphous shapes began to solidify and create boundaries which seem correct at first visually. Then, other colors and shapes begin to suggest themselves, like automatic writing, and the current boundaries are dissolved and reformed.”

Hanley’s paintings are like an embrace, warm and inviting to a viewer. At first glance, abstract but resonating shapes emerge – a place, an object, a time – taking a viewer to where they need to go in order to achieve their own personal healing. To Hanley, beauty equals harmony and balance, two things imperative to the healing process.

“Look at a painting, look at a sunset or a beautiful landscape and see if it doesn’t make you feel better,” she said.