Remembering Bob Hanson

Please join us in a celebration of the life of Robert Hanson, Wednesday, December 28 from 5:30-7:30 PM at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, 417 NW 9th Avenue. There will be brief remarks at 6:30 PM.

PNCA and the broader Portland art community will greatly miss Faculty Emeritus, Robert Hanson, who passed away Friday morning at age 75. Hanson was a Professor of Painting and Drawing at PNCA for 34 years and an integral part of the PNCA community, continuing his involvement after his retirement. As recently as 2008, PNCA’s Feldman Gallery presented BEAUTIES, an exhibition of his drawings. Professor Anne Johnson conducted a thoughtful and illuminating interview with Hanson, I WANT THE IMAGE TO BLOW APART: A Conversation with Robert Hanson, in 2009 for PNCA’s Untitled online magazine. In that conversation, Hanson said of teaching, “I enjoyed discussing something with a pencil, sitting down where the student was sitting and then talking while drawing out an explanation, which was often fragmentary, at the edge of the page; and I think some of that is carried over into all those fragmentary elements in my drawings.”

Hanson was educated at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, came to Portland in the 1970s, and was represented for many years by Elizabeth Leach Gallery. He is survived by his wife, artist Judy Cooke.

Barry Johnson has written a kind remembrance honoring Hanson on Oregon ArtsWatch illustrated with a number of Hanson’s drawings supplied by his dealer, Elizabeth Leach Gallery.

The community will have the opportunity to celebrate Hanson’s art next month as a show of his drawings, APEX: Robert Hanson, opens January 2, 2012 at the Portland Art Museum and runs through April 29, 2012. Curated by Bonnie Laing-Malcolmson, The Arlene and Harold Schnitzer Curator of Northwest Art, the exhibition features a selection of Hanson’s drawings of women.

Photo: Heather Zinger ‘10