Being There

 

Standing in an old mill now converted into an artist loft space in North Adams, Massachusetts, on a quiet, crystal clear, blue-skied morning not unlike the one of 9/11, Stephen Hannock is telling a story that must never get any easier to tell.
   

 

“That was a bad day,” he says, nodding—a bad day, indeed. It was a bad day for many, for sure, but a particularly bad one for the Hannock family, which then consisted of wife Bridget, daughter Georgia, and Hannock himself. “There was some wild shit going on, and this is right out our window, because we lived like fifteen, twenty blocks north [of Ground Zero]. And so the planes are piling into the towers there, and it’s all so surreal.... And I went downstairs to the grocery store ... to get cash and water, and then the phone rang, and I was scrambling, getting this stuff together. And Bridget answers the phone and gets this look: ‘Honey,’ she says after hanging up, ‘we have to get to a neurologist immediately.’ And I knew exactly what was going on.”

 

 

Bridget, he explains, had been experiencing double vision for some time. She’d been put through a series of tests to try to diagnose the cause. It was the same double vision she’d first noticed after becoming pregnant and that Hannock and others thought was most likely a temporary symptom due to her pregnancy. And, in fact, the symptoms did disappear once Bridget gave birth to Georgia ... but then they returned.

 

 

“She was fine,” says Hannock, referring to Bridget’s response to that telephone call. He shakes his head, seemingly as amazed by this as by anything else that’s transpired before or since. “She was so cool about it.”

 

 

Up until that day, Hannock seems to have lived a fairly charmed life. Born in 1951, the son of a registered nurse/professional photographer and a bowling alley builder, he grew up in Albany, New York, with a sister, Sally. Like his father, who was captain of the Williams College hockey and football teams, Hannock was a jock. Although a pretty good student (despite suffering from mild dyslexia) at the Albany Academy and the Trinity-Pawling School, what Hannock enjoyed most was getting in the way of slap shots on a hockey rink.

 

 

On his way to Bowdoin College to do more of the same, however, he stopped off at Deerfield Academy for a post-graduate year, where he would meet the artist and teacher Daniel Hodermarsky. On a lark, Hannock decided to take a drawing class. How hard could it be? Not very, as it turned out. After Hodermarsky saw some of those early sketches, he let his pupil know that he didn’t need to come to class anymore, encouraging the young hockey goalie to go outside and draw instead and then come back and show him what he’d done.

 

 

“That day that Dan kicked me out of class, I knew these things would happen,” says Hannock. Not, he adds, in the exact sequence they did happen, or to the same extent, perhaps. “But in terms of your ability to bring the ideas that are exciting to you to life, I knew,” says Hannock. “Just as I knew when these guys were skating down the left side, that the guy on the right would take the shot. As far as showing, being collected, I never let that worry me.”
  

 

As it turned out, there would be no real reason to worry about that either: Hannock’s been asked to create art installations by trendy Manhattan restaurateurs Tom Colicchio (of Top Chef fame) and Danny Meyer; an eager client list includes celebrities such as Candice Bergen, Tom Brokaw, Sting, and John McEnroe; and two of his paintings currently hang in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hannock has even managed to win an Academy Award for special visual effects on the 1998 film What Dreams May Come starring Robin Williams—not to mention that he once competed in the World Frisbee Championship at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. (Yes, on the box that asks for employment, Hannock was able to claim the title of professional Frisbee player.)

 

 

And yet, for all his success, there is a matter-of-fact humility to Hannock, perhaps partly shaped by recent events, but also having to do with his career’s steady, quiet progression. “The slow burn,” Hannock says, attributing the comment to the director of the Williams College Museum of Art, Lisa Corrin. “That’s what she calls it, which I love.”
   

 

While a few select artists of his generation may have had a more meteoric rise, they’ve often flamed out early. “I missed the explosive stuff of the 1980s,” Hannock admits. “I’m not an expressionist painter.” Hannock’s somewhat out-of-fashion (by about a century) landscapes have never been the stuff that would propel him into the bright glare of instant fame, and his late arrival to New York, following more than a decade spent in the Pioneer Valley, led to a somewhat uncertain start.
   

 

Hannock admits that there were times when he felt a little ignored. The question then becomes, he says, How do you get attention? Followed up very quickly with, And what kind of attention do you seek? “It can be like being in a bad relationship,” Hannock says, about those times when no one seems to be paying much attention. “It just zaps your spirit. And sure, I’ve gone through that.”
   

 

This was mostly during those early years in New York, before he came upon the moody nocturnes, the “genre,” he says, “that has been around since the dawn of time” and for which he has become most known. One of the reasons, he believes, that museums have been more interested in his work over that of some of his more famous counterparts is that art museums—unlike galleries and critics—aren’t under the same pressure to make instant history. “So I’ve been able to lock into what I feel like painting,” he says. “There’s been an audience. Not a massive audience, but an audience.”
   

And what Hannock has mostly felt like painting is his own version of landscapes. “He understands that the most tried-and-true subject as the landscape can be reinvented,” says Corrin. “He takes up this traditional subject matter, and as the painting unfolds, we see how many associations it has for him. It’s not just that place. It’s him standing in it. The longer you spend looking at his work, the more you see that what he is interested in is the deep history of that place and how it relates to his own subjective experience [of it].”
   

 

“Steve’s works build on the tradition of European and American landscape painting of the late 1800s, but they extend this tradition in significant ways through a subtle, studied technique of mood enhancing and atmospheric tonalities of color,” adds Michael Conforti, director of The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts. “In the end, his work is fully of his moment, but the respect we have for him and his work parallels the respect he himself has for the great masters who came before him.”
   

 

Other landscape masters such as Thomas Cole, J.M.W. Turner, Frederic Edwin Church, and George Inness, to name a few. In other words, Hannock is more than a little aware of who's preceded him and how he can incorporate (or not) and build (or rebuild) on that tradition, as opposed to discarding or simply ignoring it. His most famous painting, The Oxbow: After Church, After Cole, Flooded, referred to as Hannock’s “answer” to Thomas Cole’s iconic nineteenth-century painting, underscores this point.

   

But before he could respond to any of the masters of the form, Hannock had to study them first, an education that continued beyond Deerfield via an exchange program from Bowdoin to Smith College in the early seventies, when he apprenticed under the influential artist Leonard Baskin and was subsequently taken under the wing of the Mongan sisters, Elizabeth and Agnes. (At the time, Elizabeth taught art history at Smith College and Agnes was the director of Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum.)

 

   

Hannock recalls with a smile Elizabeth Mongan’s response to one of his paintings. She looked at it and said that it was very nice before quickly disappearing. She returned a few moments later with a small group of older men dressed in white lab coats. “It’s not important what I think,” Hannock recalls her saying. “It’s important what they think.” They, being conservationists, as it turned out, and an impromptu seminar on selecting lasting materials for his paintings soon ensued.

 

   

Apart from any lofty aspirations for achieving immortality, Hannock has always been concerned with creating art that lasts. Given the hefty six-figure sums collectors pay for some of his work, he figures the least he can do is to make sure the work doesn’t decay over time. This from someone who is famous for taking a power sander to his canvases both before and after the paint is set, as well as many times in between, a technique that he came upon accidentally when trying to remove some unwanted paint from a canvas and a power sander seemed to be the only solution handy. Hannock views such contradictions and serendipity as all part of the process, seeing studied preparation coupled with wild improvisation as one of the great synergistic energies that fuel the creation of truly great art.

   

 

“It must be spontaneous,” he says, eager to draw parallels between his athletic background and his artistic one. As in sports, preparation and conditioning are crucial, but when it comes time to perform, or paint, improvisation, being in the moment, reacting to what is happening, what is changing moment to moment is, for Hannock, as important, if not more so, than the best laid plans.
   

 

Along with Hannock’s use of an actual power sander, a method that both helps create the unusual sheen and light—the famous glow and texture of his work—the employment of text in his landscapes is another recent development that has become part of this ongoing, always evolving, process. This use of text and collage, in fact, is considered by some to be the most innovative thing that’s happened to landscape painting in the last hundred years. “And far be it for me to argue,” Hannock says with a modest, but sly grin.
   

 

“It’s an interesting problem if one wants to be a painter, in general, in a world that demands layers and structure,” says MASS MoCA director Joseph C. Thompson, “and he’s found a way to practice landscape painting, in many ways the most traditional [art form], and infuse it with ideas that excite the art world as well as the eye.”
   

 

“My situation now is I tend to get these ideas for projects, large scale, almost like a set design,” adds Hannock. “The stories have to come out. And I’m not a filmmaker. The topography becomes the excuse to bring this to light.”

 

 

Hannock had mostly established himself as an artist by the time he met his future wife through restaurateurs Meyer and Colicchio in the mid-1990s. When Colicchio and Meyer were creating what would become Eleven Madison Park, long before Colicchio became famous as a regular on Top Chef, the dynamic duo wanted to have artwork built into it rather than it being an afterthought. While Hannock had spoken by phone to their assistant over the course of a couple of years by then, he recalls, he had never actually met her. And when they all went to check out the possible location for the new restaurant, Bridget came along for the ride.
  

 

“She was quite stunning,” recalls Hannock. “And needless to say, I barely heard any of Danny’s rap after that. Long story short, we got married in the space after it was finished.” This was in 2000, the same year Georgia would be born—and only one year before that awful September day.
   

 

The problem, Hannock says, continuing to recall that fateful morning, was that most of the city and certainly most of its medical staff were unavailable, everyone waiting for the injured that would never arrive. And yet somehow, through a good friend who was engaged to Matthew Fink, then the chief neurologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the Hannocks were not only able to be seen right away but managed to finish up three-days-worth of tests that same afternoon.
   

 

At first, the news was good: the mass they found in Bridget’s brain turned out to be benign. The tumor would be treated successfully for nearly three years—years that the couple would spend transitioning from Manhattan to Williamstown.
   

 

Like the creation of one of his pieces, the route to finding a home in Williamstown in 2003 was neither planned nor completely accidental. Having grown up in Albany with a father who had attended Williams College, Hannock was familiar with the region. His father, in fact, built the bowling alley, Mt. Greylock Bowl, still located in North Adams on Route 2. His parents had been renting various places in Williamstown over the years, and so Hannock decided to buy them a house there, with the idea that, given how unsettled his and Bridget’s lives were, they might be able to use the house as well. But when the time came for Hannock to live there permanently, he couldn’t kick his parents out. So he bought a second place for himself, his bride, and his daughter.
   

The other deciding factor in choosing Williamstown, he says, is the fact that it’s one of the only places in North America with three world-class art museums within a two-mile radius and no rush-hour traffic. “I go by The Clark once a week; I duck into MASS MoCA three afternoons in a ten-day period just to look around,” he says. “You don’t have to fight fifteen people in front of any given object. That this creates the engine for making art cannot be overestimated.”
   

 

Hannock continues to keep a studio/apartment in New York City, but now spends most of his time in Williamstown. Soon after they made the move, however, Hannock’s father passed away. And then that same year, Bridget required surgery in order to relieve hydrocephalus. During the procedure, she suffered a stroke. And then, while recovering from her stroke, another tumor soon developed at what Hannock describes as “the biological speed of light.” Bridget died within a couple of weeks of its discovery.
   

 

One of Hannock’s quirky advantages as a painter (which was also of help during his hockey- and Frisbee-playing days) is that he’s ambidextrous. So he often works with both hands, sometimes even simultaneously. This creates an unusual symmetry to his work, a kind of mirroring effect, that also seems to manifest itself in Hannock’s life as well. As far as whatever good fortune Hannock has had, and the slow but steady trajectory of his artistic career, it sure seems like a case of what goes around comes around. What the left hand has been doing somehow helps out the right. Hannock can attribute much of his current success to events that happened long ago, and often due to the accumulation of these small, sometimes seemingly random events and connections. Early on, he often gave artwork away in order to ensure that it simply “got up on the wall.”
   

 

“If no one sees it, nothing is going to happen,” says Hannock. “Frequently, I would have paintings sold and only end up taking twenty percent. My background is in athletics, and I know what you can achieve with a team of players. Affecting the culture with fine art in this day and age requires the work of a lot of people. And these people need to get paid, somehow. The fallacy of these galleries taking fifty percent and running off to party at their houses in the Hamptons—well, nothing could be further from the truth. And putting up with these personalities, many that are totally psychedelic, and dealing with a whole stable of them? You couldn’t pay me enough money.”
   

 

While an artist always fears not being able to make a living from his art—and for years Hannock was no exception—money, or the lack of it, is no longer a pressing concern. His success continues to grow almost exponentially. And while Hannock often used to do three shows a year, each consisting of fifteen paintings, he’s been able to slow down a bit more recently. (“I don’t do all-nighters anymore,” he confesses.) A slight decrease in production, however, has only created more demand for his work.
   

 

A new show, his first gallery exhibition in five years, opens November 5 at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, where his work has been shown for the past twenty years. He also participated in another closer-to-home show in October at the Harrison Gallery on Spring Street in Williamstown that featured Nancy Rothlauf and Jamie Young, two artists Hannock knows well—clearly a case of Hannock wanting to cast some reflected light upon these other, lesser-known artists. This year has also marked the publication of Stephen Hannock, a beautifully produced coffee-table book of his work. Meanwhile, a degenerative eye disease that Hannock and his doctor closely monitor and that remains somewhat unpredictable adds an increased sense of urgency to his work, as if he needed one. One of the many lessons he’s learned from his wife’s death, he says, is not to waste any time.
   

 

A year after Bridget’s death, Hannock and Georgia went to Madison Square Park, right next to Eleven Madison Park, for a ceremony to commemorate the successful completion of the park’s restoration, a project Bridget was very involved with before her death. The Rose family, prominent in real-estate family in Manhattan and also close friends and longtime collectors, had worked out a deal with the mayor to complete the project. At the garden dedication, amongst a hundred or so family and friends, Sting and Dominick Miller performed. Sting, who has commissioned Hannock to paint scenes of his childhood home in Newcastle, sang “Fields of Gold.”
   

 

“Sting and I had been getting into trouble for about twenty-five years, so I wasn’t surprised by the gesture,” says Hannock, “but [I was surprised that he was] actually able to pull it off given his insane schedule.” A plaque at the park says simply, ‘Bridget’s Garden.’ Georgia and her father are frequent visitors.
   

 

At fifty-eight, and having recently lost a father and a wife, Hannock is more aware than ever that people come into the world, and then they leave it. “That’s a very humbling thing,” he says. “I didn’t find my girl until I was in my forties. I didn’t get married until I was almost fifty. Nothing is guaranteed ... it’s a very, very tough thing to deal with, especially with a little girl who really misses her mom. But my job is such that I’m not under the pressure of meeting the schedule of another employee that you have to deal with. We’re doing really well here. I could have never imagined this kind of success. And so you keep going. You just keep going.”
   

 

Shortly after coming to Williamstown, Hannock finished a painting called Heroic Woman, a nude of Bridget standing with hands on hips, very pregnant, very proud. Behind her are a few collage items of personal significance, such as a photograph of Hannock with Daniel Hodermarsky. There’s also a TIME magazine cover of George Harrison, the member of the Beatles for whom Hannock had the greatest affinity, as well as an obituary notice of his early mentor Leonard Baskin.
   

 

In 2004, despite a bit of grumbling from some of the Deerfield old guard, Hannock donated Heroic Woman to Deerfield Academy, where it hangs to this day in the entryway of the fine arts building, so that its current crop of budding artists can see it day in and day out.  [NOV/DEC 2009]
 

Chris Newbound is managing editor of Berkshire Living. Find more of his articles, book reviews, and blogposts at www.berkshireliving.com.

 

THE GOODS

Stephen Hannock

Stephen Hannock
Hudson Hills Press