Beginning this past Sunday, John Hancock’s newest exhibition – a collection of incredible feats of imagination, expression and wall-sized installation – has been on display in the Lyet Gallery of Leffler Chapel and Performance Center.
Pieces will continue to be shown through Feb. 28. The exhibit encompasses Hancock’s creative movement from smaller paintings and drawings on paper to large-scale drawings on Mylar that sometimes span the height and length of walls and floors. Hancock lives and works with a particular affinity for the realistic presentation of natural objects juxtaposed with the geometric and abstract shapes of man-made objects, mirroring his personal exploration of the natural world around him and our place within it as humans.
Natural objects play an integral role in the composition of Hancock’s nature drawings. Everything from birds to seedpods to berries is depicted within these soft, dream-like scenes. Hancock describes himself as a “classicist,” and someone who “[sees] the here and now as layered realities – past and present, personal and natural history – my work [is] complex and imperfect. It is always a bit unstable and idiosyncratic, but ultimately it strives to be essential and intrinsically humane.”
Essential also to Hancock’s formulation of artistic composition is his idea of “image-objects.” Beginning with a close and direct observation, Hancock translates objects from vision to concrete depiction, using drawings, sketches, photographs and handwritten notes to capture the object in its true form. Crafting any of these unique pieces requires constant, meticulous attention to detail, careful revision and focused experimentation. The works most often originate as drawings or watercolors and may later evolve into more structured or layered pieces with increasing levels of varied media. “Sometimes I combine these and other materials, improvising and re-working the image,” Hancock said. “In this way, I can bring together naturalistic and abstract elements, use the excitement and tension between them and create a type of visual harmony in each painting or drawing.”
Almost paradoxical in their presentation, Hancock’s works depict ultra-realistic natural objects with more abstract, geometric or human shapes. Balancing flora and fauna, organic and geometric, color and monochrome, Hancock’s pieces achieve a sense of balance amid the chaos of their alternating layers and dimensions. “[I] interrupt realism with abstraction,” Hancock said. “In this way, my paintings and works on paper disrupt conventions of landscape, still life and portraiture.” Hancock often pairs sets of images that might never be seen on the same page together in other artists’ works; berries with family portraits, birds with checkerboard earth, a single leaf hovering above a pastoral landscape. Each piece is intrinsically driven by the presence of these “image-objects” and the roles in which they play within the composition, as well as how they interact with the objects, characters and scenes of other mixed media layers above and below them.
“Each field is a tentative integration of opposites, a structured space,” Hancock said. “Near and far, literal and imaginary, my images resist the perfection of closure, and yet it is the harmonics of color and composition that knit the fragments back together.”
Hancock’s drawings possess a distinct mood of quiet contemplativeness, remembrance and reflectiveness; monochrome birds, leaves, seed pods and flowers sketched on pale backdrops are balanced with dark, earth-toned swatches of abstract landscape, memorial imagery and sometimes chaotic depths of deep shadows. The pieces are characterized by their almost monochromatic color schemes – natural blacks and browns and creams – and their mesmerizing dimensions and intricacies. The collection on display in the Lyet Gallery is sure to inspire the thoughtful and reflective spirit in all its visitors.
Hancock earned his B.F.A. from Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Ga. and his M.F.A. from East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C. He is a recipient of a 1999-2000 Eastern Regional Artists project grant and a 2000 recipient of the Vermont Studio Center/North Carolina Arts Council Artist Fellowship Award.
He has lived, worked and taught in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains in central Virginia for over ten years. Prior to this, he lived, worked and studied in several locations throughout the Southeastern and Midwestern U.S., from Atlanta to Wichita and from Florida to North Carolina. “Moving about the country so much fueled my love of travel,” he said. “I must admit to an addiction to the exploration of both exotic and ordinary places.”
Hancock regularly exhibits work throughout the country, and he has also shown in England. For many years, he has worked as a professor of art; he now enjoys working in the studio full-time, teaching the occasional college art class as an adjunct associate professor of art at Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave, Va., judging art shows, conducting workshops and giving presentations to professional and community art groups and schools. His work resides in permanent corporate, public and private collections across the U.S. and abroad.
