Gaylen C. Hansen

Gaylen Capener Hansen (born September 21, 1921) is an American artist best known for neo-expressionist figurative paintings that feature the flora and fauna of the Palouse, a geographically unusual area in Eastern Washington state where he lives and works, and "the Kernal," Hansen's alter-ego frontiersman whose often-perilous adventures are depicted in many of the artist's canvases.

Hansen's paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Beijing, and Singapore, and are held in numerous public and private collections.

Hansen has received several prestigious awards, including the Flintridge Foundation Awards for Visual Artists in 2001.

Between 2007 and 2010, Hansen was the subject of a traveling retrospective exhibition, titled "Gaylen Hansen: Three Decades of Paintings."

Hansen served on the faculty at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, from 1957 to 1982.

Early life and education Gaylen Hansen was born in Garland, Utah, on September 21, 1921. During the mid-1800s, Hansen's family traveled west with Mormon pioneers to escape religious persecution. They settled in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, then a wild and uncultivated wilderness. Until World War II, horses were used by the Mormons to farm the rugged land, demanding work that young Gaylen said he was "made for." Hansen rode saddle horses and worked with cows, sheep, goats, pigs, dogs, cats, geese, ducks, chickens and pigeons. All would turn up again later in Hansen's paintings.

Until 1927, Hansen lived with his parents in Salt Lake City and Ogden, Utah. Following his parents' divorce, Hansen and his brother, Arthur, returned to Garland to live on an organic farm owned by his mother's parents. Hansen's mother, Verna (Whalen) Hansen, a dressmaker who enjoyed grand opera and art, soon moved to Los Angeles, California, to secure employment. While at the farm, Hansen began drawing images "based on illustrations in The Saturday Evening Post."

Other Hansen students who became "serious and respected artists" include Ken Cory, Jack Dollhausen, Robert Helm, Les LePere, and Patrick Siler. Dollhausen, Helm, and Siler also took teaching positions at WSU. His signature style was influenced by important 20th Century artists, art movements, and personal and cultural events.

1940s During his teaching tenure at the University of Austin during the 1940s, Hansen said he painted in a range of styles: "Mondrian, Picasso, Paul Klee, plus realistic still lifes and drawings."

While teaching at Yakima Valley College during the mid-1950s, Hansen met artist Roy De Forest, who would inherit Hansen's teaching position. Hansen credited De Forest, known for his comic-like depictions of dogs, with turning "my head around to a different angle of perception."

1960s Between 1962 and 1964, Hansen developed a working relationship with Canadian graduate student Iain Baxter (now a noted conceptual artist) at WSU. Hansen and Baxter explored many art movements, including the work of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi, who obsessively arranged and rearranged the same ordinary objects for his canvases.

Hansen depicted the Country Club enclosed by walls adorned with hearts and surrounded by dog-headed mountains. In Hansen's paintings, the Country Club was inhabited by a bearded pipe-smoking figure who would become the prototype for "the Kernal," Hansen's alter ego. Hansen also began to make paintings of the Kernal going on long journeys.

In his Eastern Washington studio, Hansen summons familiar flora, fauna, and favorite objects to his canvases, including dogs, tulips, trout, grasshoppers, magpies, moons, work gloves, bison, bulls, bears, and ducks. However, Hansen depicts and arranges his recurring subjects in a manner uniquely his own. In Hansen's paintings, a trout takes wing with a flock of ducks; a minivan-sized grasshopper perches on a sofa; a bison, a trout, and a tulip stand on end at equal heights in a neat row; and giant gleaming moons light the way, or deepen dread.

A frequent traveler among these odd ensembles is a bearded character Hansen calls "the Kernal," often described as the artist's alter-ego, or Everyman figure. The Kernal, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Hansen, is usually shown in profile, seemingly aloof to the curious circumstances unfolding about him. Thus Hansen's images are more a reflection of his "interior landscape" than the literal objects he depicts.

In a 2007 interview, Hansen recalled how ancient Egyptian and Persian miniature art influenced his narrative style:

For the "Gaylen C. Hansen" exhibition at the Glowbow Museum in 1979, art curator Peter White wrote:

The Palouse lies 150 miles northeast of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a 586-square-mile shrub-steppe desert. Between 1943 and 1987, the Hanford site was used to produce plutonium for the bomb that brought World War II to an end, and to meet potential threats during the Cold War. Weapons production processes left solid and liquid wastes that posed a risk to the local environment. A federal effort to clean up the Hanford site began in 1989.

The Kernal While on a sabbatical leave in California from WSU in the 1960s, Hansen drew a cartoon-like figure of a bent leg with black and white stripes that would evolve into a favorite recurring subject, which he called "the Kernal."

Methods Hansen eschews stretcher bars, easels, and picture frames in his work. Instead, he staples blank canvases to a wall in his studio and tears them down when done painting them. According to art curator Peter White, the canvases' tattered edges lend them a "feeling of remnants from another civilization."

Many of Hansen's canvases are large-scale works. A Hansen painting in the Seattle Art Museum Collection, "Fish in a Landscape" (1979), measures 72 1/4 inches x 168 inches.

Hansen has painted similar paintings with oil and acrylic paints to compare the different qualities of the two mediums.

Exhibitions Gaylen Hansen's work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally.

Museums and institutions From 1985 to 1987, a retrospective exhibition, "Gaylen Hansen: The Paintings of a Decade, 1975-1985," was presented at the Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; University Art Museum, Pullman, WA; Boise Gallery of Art, Boise, ID; Galerie Redmann, Berlin, Germany; Museum of Art, Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania, PA; Portland Center for the Visual Arts, Portland, OR; and San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA.

In 1999, a traveling exhibition, titled "Wild Beasts!", featured paintings by Hansen and Roy De Forest, which were described as "irreverent and humorous visual narratives based on [the artists'] lives and experiences in the American West." Organized by the Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art in Great Falls, MT, the exhibition was presented at Paris Gibson Square Museum of Art; Yellowstone Art Museum, Billings, MT; Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, WA; and Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, OR.

In 2007 and 2008, Hansen was the subject of "Gaylen Hansen: Three Decades of Paintings," a retrospective exhibition organized by the Museum of Art at Washington State University (WSU). The exhibition was presented at Museum of Art at WSU, Pullman WA; Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, Spokane, WA; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT; and the Missoula Art Museum , Missoula, MT. In 2010, the exhibition was presented at the Maui Arts and Cultural Center in Maui, HI.

Galleries Gallery exhibitions of Hansen's paintings were presented at Otto Seligman Gallery, Seattle, WA (1959); Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA (1959); University of Idaho, Moscow, ID (1966); Spokane Art Center, Spokane, WA (1967); University of Colorado, Boulder, CO (1972); Fine Arts Center, Washington State University, Pullman, WA (1967, 1972, 1975, 1977); Spokane Falls Community College Art Gallery, Spokane, WA (1980); Manolides Gallery, Seattle, WA (1977, 1976, 1981); Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta, Canada (1981); Monique Knowlton Gallery, New York, NY (1980, 1981, 1983, 1987, 1990, 1992, 1994); and LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM (2000). In 1990, Hansen received the Washington State Governor's Arts Award, presented by Gov. Booth Gardner. In 1984, Hansen received a Sambuca Romana Contemporary Artists Fellowship from The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, New York.

Permanent collections Smithsonian American Art Collection (Washington, DC) Seattle Art Museum (Seattle, Washington, US) New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, New York) Arkansas Art Center (Little Rock, Arkansas, US) Northwest Museum of Arts & Culture (Spokane, Washington, US) City of Seattle, Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs (Seattle, Washington, US) Museum of Art, Washington State University (Spokane, Washington, US) Yale University Art Gallery, Yale University (New Haven, Connecticut, US) Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, Washington, US) Boise Art Museum (Boise, Idaho, US) Microsoft Corporation (Redmond, Washington, US)

Personal life Hansen lived for decades in the Palouse region of Eastern Washington with his wife, artist Heidi Oberheide, in a small house, barn, and neighboring studios overlooking a river valley. Oberheide, whom gallery director John Braseth described as "inseparable" from Hansen "in life and in art," has since died.