Art Hansen

As a life-long resident of the Pacific Northwest, Art Hansen (1929-2017) illustrated intimate reflections on his immediate environs with his hand colored etchings and lithographs. Focusing particularly on evergreen forests and more recently on close-up views of flowers, Hansen's meditative prints of nature often tend toward abstractions and recall Japanese woodblocks in their composition. In addition to landscape, Hansen has also explored humans in their daily activities with a comic eye.

Following his studies at the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota, Hansen was awarded a Fullbright Fellowship, and studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich, Germany. He also received a Pulitzer Prize for Art in 1952. The attention to subtle detail seen in his prints and his studies in Munich and nearby Nuremberg, have earned him comparisons to the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer. At the same time, his stylized and deceptively simple compositions bring to mind Japanese woodblock artists such as Hiroshig. Hansen has exhibited in galleries around the United States and his work is in collections of the Bayerische Graphische Sammlugn, Munich; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; University of Oregon, New York Public Library, and Seattle Art Museum