dan hansen

Houses and Dinghies

2012-01-12T08:02:00.001-08:00

18" x 24" oil on canvas
Originally I wanted to see if I could make this painting fairly quickly. After all it's smallish, 18" x 24" and at first I was going to use fairly realistic colors and contrast. Also the composition is fairly simple. But as I got into it I could see that by changing the colors slightly, and boosting the contrast, it could be much, much stronger. Where the central house is now, originally there was a dinghy, but I could see that it was way too conventional. The colors and the contrast were actually very difficult. I would paint something, realize it didn't work quite right, change the color the tiniest bit (and I mean tiny), and then repaint it. I like a lot how the painting turned out but it was definitely a struggle getting it there.

Detail #1. You can see some of the original grass color poking through here and there.

Detail #2. Here's a piece of the ocean and yellowish sky. Here again I wanted to see if I could make the ocean work with a graphic pattern.

Detail #3. Although this painting looks like it was done fairly quickly (and I like that look) it wasn't. It drives me crazy when a painting looks like it was carefully done. You know, every color transition is smooth, every blade of grass is fussed over, every detail is carefully done, etc. It doesn't mean it's wrong for an artist to do that, it's just not my taste at all.

Detail #4. Here are some of the dinghies. To the left of the red one you can see that I ruffed out another, didn't like it, so painted over it.
Currently I'm working on another painting of the same size, and hope to finish it before classes at CalArts get going again...we'll see.

Houses on the Lake

2012-01-06T19:24:00.001-08:00

18" x 24" Oil on canvas.
Sorry I've fallen off the map. Things at CalArts have been so busy I haven't had time to paint for quite a while. However it's the break at Christmas time so I've had the chance to get back to painting for the last couple of weeks. I decided to do a couple of small ones to get back in the swing. Even though this is pretty small I struggled and struggled. It finally came together but it was a pain. I kind of like a painting to look like a bunch of mistakes that go together to make an image.
Detail #1. The darkest area looks black here but it's actually a very dark blue. Like I said earlier I really concentrate on design, and feel that it doesn't just apply to size and shape but to values and even to colors.
To many, many people the more photographic an image is the better it is. The way I look at it is that if someone wants something to look photographic s/he can simply get a camera.
Detail #3. The darkest area is a reflection of the under side of the bridge. It kind of looks black here but it's really alizarine (sp?) crimson and a little thalo green.

Roads and Houses

2011-07-23T14:37:00.000-07:00

This may be the last painting I blog for a few weeks. CalArts has been a lot of work this summer so I haven't had much time to paint. I finished this a few weeks ago. I'm quite happy how this turned out but it was a real struggle making it work. I really strive for a painting to be abstract but at the same time totally recognizable.
Detail #1. I finished the entire painting but was only happy with this part, so it's what I kept and completely changed the rest. Green and purple are a very strange color combination but I wanted to try to make them work because I really liked the part above.
Detail #2. Hopefully you can see how abstract this painting is from some of these details. Although ultimately I shoot for everything to make sense, as if I was actually painting on location, I want every paint stroke, every splotch of color, etc. to be completely abstract.
Detail #3. More stuff.
Detail #4. It's easier to see how abstract this is when looking at a small piece of the painting.

Red Truck

2011-07-16T14:13:00.000-07:00

27" x 36" oil on canvas. Sorry that I've kind of dropped off the map. Even though it's summer I've had a ton to do at CalArts. I'm actually getting a little crispy on the edges and will be more than ready for some time off before school starts in September. Another example of how I like a painting to work 2D and at the same time 3D.
Detail #1 This photo's a little soft. I think the camera was too close to the painting, sorry.
Detail #2 What I usually shoot for is a painting that reads very quickly...maybe 5 seconds, and yet is so interesting that you could look at it a thousand times and still see something new. Of course I wish I was always successful at it.
Detail #3 The splotch of yellow paint near the hood of the truck is slightly green. Green is the complement of red so it makes the truck stand out more than a warm yellow would.
Detail #4 Some things, like the yellow horizontal line, are simply for visual interest...it's not to represent anything, it's just for visual interest.

Big Red Cloud

2011-06-07T23:18:00.000-07:00

40" x 48" oil on canvas. I wanted to make the cloud seem huge so I made some real tiny houses on the bottom of the painting.

Detail #1. This is pretty close to the actual size of the houses...as you can see they're fairly lose.

Detail #2. The color of the cloud is an orangeish red. What I think is interesting is that for some reason this made the cloud look like it's somewhere in the midwest...

Detail #3 I think maybe the midwest thing has something to do with the sky color too.

Detail #4

Trees

2011-06-04T08:36:00.000-07:00

18" x 24" oil on canvas. I'm trying out a different layout to see if the weirdness with the text goes away or is equally weird. When the painting is on the left and the text is on the right the relationship between painting and text often gets completely messed up for some reason. This painting is super simple and fairly small. Even with something simple like this I always shoot for interesting design. In fact I never even start a painting without thinking design.

Detail #1 Super simple. There's probably a great book out there on design but I'm not familiar with it. The way I learned design was based on how it was taught at the Bauhaus in Germany in 1919-1933.

Detail #2 Also I shoot for color relationships...colors that work well together. I may not be phenomenal at color but colors that work well together is something important to me.

Detail #3 Once again pretty simple...maybe too simple, but the jury's still out.

Overlooking Water

2011-05-30T18:15:00.000-07:00

22" x 30" oil on canvas.
Another fairly rough painting. I'm not at all satisfied with the sky color but decided to upload this image anyway. It's not at all unusual for me to finish a painting only to realize later I want to change something...that's just sort of the way I work. Maybe I'll be working on a painting and put it aside for a day or a month and look at it and realize I hate the color of this, or the shape of that.

Detail #2 Sorry that the numbering is somewhat messed up. I was going to add another detail and decided not to at the last minute. The two light things in the water are supposed to be boats. I decided to make them simply paint strokes to see if they'd read as boats...and I think they do.

Detail #3 Nothing amazing.

Detail #4

After Rain

2011-03-26T08:58:00.001-07:00

36" x 48" oil on canvas.
Well it's spring break and even though my son brought his camera it has been raining or cloudy all week, so the light has been too cool to photograph anything. However this image was on my hard drive.
When starting this painting I was going to make the houses that are in sunlight in a continuous horizontal band, but very quickly I could see it wasn't going to work. So as you can see I didn't do that.

Detail #1. Here's another case where I ruffed out the shrub and then painted the negative space (the lawn) to define it. I like the look of that MUCH more than painting the grass before painting the shrub.

Detail #2. Ditto.

Detail #3. The windows and other stuff are just splotches of color.

Detail #4. More splotches of color.

Yellow Stripe

2011-02-16T22:30:00.000-08:00

36" x 48" oil on canvas.
I probably won't post anything until spring break when my son is back from school with his camera. I'll have to see if I have images for one more painting on my hard drive.
Here everything was kind of back lit and from the left so I could get the purpleish (is that a word?) shadow on the ground.

Detail #1 I painted the sky several times because I wasn't happy with the color. I remember it started out blue but I think blue is kind of a twinky color for sky. Also, if it was blue it wouldn't make the hills in the distance be anything special.
If I remember correctly another time it was sort of pinkish.

Detail #2. Another shot of the background hill. Now that I look at it the orangeish highlights on the distant trees is too dark, so it doesn't work as light.
I like the way the yellow field is mostly just a horizontal line.

Detail #3. Now I see that the values could have been pushed farther.

Detail #4. The paint that breaks the shadow on the bottom was just runny paint. Here again I can see now that the value of the shadow could have been pushed farther...next painting.

Houses Near Water #1

2011-02-10T19:20:00.000-08:00

40" x 48" oil on canvas.
Another of the 3/4 down shots. I wanted to try something quite different than the others I had done.

Detail #1. Sorry if these notes aren't lined up properly with the images. It seems to be something screwy with the blog, and I've gotten tired of trying to line up the type since it's different every time.
The paint is pretty thin so you can kind of see the painting underneath.

Detail #2 The paint here's pretty thin too.

Detail #3 Fairly abstract.

Red Truck #2

2011-02-03T22:09:00.000-08:00

40" x 48" oil on canvas.
Ok so it looks like a maroon colored truck rather than a red one. But who in their right mind would want to buy a painting called "Maroon Truck #2"? Another 3/4 down shot...or at least that's what I call these. As I've said previously I like them to work 2D and at the same time 3D. I'm usually a pretty slow painter but this only took about 2 or 3 days.

Detail #1 Nothing amazing here but the paint for the ground was pretty runny. I know painters who always make the brush strokes describe the form...so if they're painting the ground, for instance, the brush strokes will go in the direction of the ground. However I almost never do that because I want the painting to be 2D rather than just a representation of a 3D object.

Detail #2 This is an example of how I like to ruff in something (in this case the shadow) and then create its shape by painting the negative shape...in this case the ground.

Detail #3 A board in light and in shadow.

Detail #4 Light and shadow...the shadow isn't black but that's how it looks in this photo.

Fishing Cabins

2011-01-28T19:10:00.001-08:00

20" x 24" oil on canvas.
Another small one. Again I tried graphic shapes on the water to add interest. However I don't think they're 100% successful.

Detail #1 the image of the boats is much bigger than on the painting.

Detail #2 Also much bigger than on the painting. One thing I frequently do, and you can see it here somewhat, is that rather than painting the positive shape I paint the negative shape. (Here as an example I painted the grass, and that creates the shape of the house.) Doing so not only creates the positive shape, but creates visual interest.

Detail #3 Here again you can kind of see that rather than paint the shrubs and shadows I painted the grass...and that described the shapes of the shrubs and shadows.

Long Shadows

2011-01-22T17:22:00.001-08:00

36" x 48" oil on canvas.
This is another of the 3/4 down shots. I painted three or four of these (different subjects of course), to see if I could create interesting paintings.

Detail #1 The color in this painting is pretty rich but you'd never know it from this photo.

Detail #2. I know this is the stupidest reason for a vertical photo but I wanted to see if it would show up or if it would get clipped on the blog...sorry but that really was the reason.

Detail #3 Playing again with the color of light and the color of shadow. Not 100% successful though.

Green Truck

2011-01-15T09:43:00.001-08:00

36" x 48" oil on canvas.

I made a few paintings like this 3/4 down shot which are kind of interesting because they're fairly geometric or graphic. Some of you are going to find these way too severe, and that's fine.

Detail #1 Even the shrubs are these funny little geometric things.

Detail #2 It's really unlike me to do a painting using all straight lines.

Detail #3 Even though this painting is very unlike my other work one thing I always use is the COLOR of light and the COLOR of shadow. They're not simply a matter of using white and black (or gray.)

Big Blue Sky

2011-01-10T09:11:00.000-08:00

40" x 48" oil on canvas.

I wanted to see if I could make an interesting painting with the main subject in just a strip on the bottom. So the colors of the houses and stuff are fairly intense in this painting but I think they work pretty well.

Detail #1. There's a very slight value difference between the sky on the right and that on the left.

Detail #2. Here you can see the use of color that makes the houses and fields interesting. They could be pretty bland otherwise.

Detail #3. I tried to make these palm trees read as palm trees even though they're shaped kind of like Q-Tips.

House on Green and Brown

2011-01-04T15:13:00.000-08:00

30" x 36" oil on canvas.
I don't know why the house came out so bland in this photo 'cause it's color is actually quite rich. In the painting the color is definitely affected by the color of the sunlight. So even though it's supposed to look like a white house it's fairly golden colored. I photographed this painting in the afternoon, but since it was lightly raining outside the color in the image is somewhat cool.
Detail #1 The color of the house in this image is more accurate than the one above. The color of the roof isn't dark gray, it leans more toward a cool red so it looks like a cool terracotta.

Detail #2 The distant hill is more blue on the right of the trees and more purple on the left. The value and intensity are essentially the same so it reads as one thing and not two. The green field is slightly more intense on the right.

Tree and Houses

2010-12-30T19:56:00.001-08:00

24" x 30" oil on canvas.
The colors in this painting were influenced by something I saw several years ago. When we were working on "Pocahontas" in Glendale, there was a fire across the freeway in Griffith Park. At that time several of us were in a temporary building right next to the directors.

As I was walking to see the directors, I noticed that because of the smoke in the air the sidewalk was pink and the shadows were a very intense blue.

It's probably completely obvious to someone else but at that point I began to realize that sunlight actually had a COLOR and that shadows had a COLOR too. A lot of painters add just WHITE to lighten something, and they mix BLACK to make shadows. I don't even own a tube of black paint because ever since the fire it drives me crazy how it's often used. It's great to use black as a COLOR, like if someone is wearing a black t-shirt or is driving a black car. But to use it as the color for a shadow kills me.

2. I often like to paint fairly loosely but make things look completely recognizable.

3. Also as you can tell I don't like rendering.

4. The shadows in this photo might look like I used black but I guarantee you I didn't.

5. Depending on what I'm painting I might use Pthalo Blue or Alizerine Crimson or something like that for a shadow color.

Reservoir and Truck

2010-12-30T15:30:00.001-08:00

40" x 48" oil on canvas.
1. I posted this painting previously but for some reason it didn't show up.
This photo is a little over exposed but I was too lazy to shoot it again. This size is what I prefer but I'm trying to get used to painting smaller.

Even though I usually paint somewhat loosely the paint is pretty thinned out with turp because I like to show what's underneath.
This is how I like to play with 2D and 3D.

4. In this image the rectangle on the right is actually more orange than yellow...it's the same as the orange field in the image above.

Houses Near Water

2010-12-29T18:43:00.001-08:00

22" x 30" oil on canvas.
To take this photo the painting was lit by lights on the right and left, and I couldn't gt rid of the glare on the upper left.

I didn't want to paint a blue sky because the majority of the painting is blue ocean. However I wanted to paint it a color that wouldn't be distracting (as it would be if there was too much contrast between the ocean and sky), and worked well with the color of light in the painting.

It may be difficult to see but the sky is actually two horizontal bands of orange...a lighter orange on the bottom and a darker band of orange on the top. It may sound silly but I painted it four or five times to get the colors and values right. Also I wanted the island with houses to be the focal point and not the sky.

As I was doing this painting I decided to make the water have a graphic pattern which I think is pretty successful. The ocean takes up so much of the painting and I wanted to see if I could get a pattern to work.
2.As usual I wanted the light to have a color, and the shadow to have a color too.

3. The light and shadow colors for the foreground houses is the same as on the island houses. However they don't distract from the main focal point.

4. I like the design created by the palm trees. The pattern on the water is interesting too.

Fields

2010-12-29T17:26:00.000-08:00

27" x 36" oil on canvas.
1. I might have said previously that painting is a struggle for me, but I like the look of that struggle. I'll paint something, then possibly change the color, or often change the shapes until it looks right. However I don't block out the "mistakes" because the finished painting looks better to me when they are visible. This painting has lots and lots of things like that. It's easiest to see on the two closest fields on the right...you can see what was painted earlier. Or look at the white building that's closest. You can see the light color in the dark side of the building. I really like stuff like that. I think it makes the painting much more interesting. So the painting looks entirely recognizable but it's really an abstract.

2. In the green field you can also see what was painted underneath.

3. You can also see the underpainting on the field on the right. To me it makes the painting much more interesting than if the "mistakes" were completely covered.

4. You can see it once again on the field on the right side, and in the wide "white" band. In fact there's yellow and pink that show thru on that band of light pink and pale yellow.

Lompoc Flower Fields

2010-12-29T16:56:00.001-08:00

18" x 24" oil on canvas.
1. Another small one. Whether painting large or small the format is often the same 'cause I don't like them too rectangular.

2. Although the shadow side of the shrub might look like it's black it's not really. I probably used mainly Alizerine Crimson and maybe knocked down the intensity with Pthalo Green.

As you can see the shadow on the ground from the shrub is a cool blue.

Produce Stand

2010-12-29T16:37:00.000-08:00

27" x 36" oil on canvas.
Although I like this painting now I worked and worked on it. As I said previously I like to play with 2D and 3D. That is I like the paintings to work three dimensionally but at the same time work as flat shapes. That's why the trees in the distance are essentially a horizontal band of color.

Detail #1 Once again the light and shadow have color, they're not simply white and gray.

Detail #2The trees are splotches of color which describe the light and shadow sides.

Detail #4 The part of the sign in light is pinker than it turned out in this photo.

House and Reservoir

2010-12-29T14:03:00.000-08:00

18" x 24" oil on canvas.
This is another small one. I like the way "mistakes" look so I usually don't try to cover them entirely. Probably the easiest place to see that is on the sky. I loosely painted it the lighter color and then later decided to paint it slightly bluer (is "bluer" even a real word?)

After roughing in this hill I painted the orange line. Even though it looks like a field or something it's just an orange horizontal linle to me.

Houses on Hill #3

2010-12-29T10:53:00.001-08:00

20" x 24" oil on canvas.
Hopefully this image isn't too soft since it's the only one I still have for this painting.

I always paint in oil 'cause I like the way it looks and feels. Also I like the fact that the colors are the same when they dry as when they're wet.

Acrylics aren't that way. They're slightly darker and the colors are more intense (brighter) when wet. Don't get me wrong, there are some amazing artists who love to work in acrylics. I just don't happen to be one of them.