Gaylen C. Hansen

Hansen's paintings can also veer away from humor toward "dark extremes of desperation and fear." In a 2013 exhibit, Hansen's dogs, often humorous subjects in his paintings, displayed a very different character. In her review of the exhibit, The Seattle Times art critic and professor Gayle Clemans wrote:

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

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

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.

In 2002, Hansen was given a Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists for "serious continued artistic exploration and the development of a distinctive artistic voice that can be identified in the artists' work dating back 20-plus years." 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.

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

Since 2001, Hansen's work has been shown at the Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle, WA (Hansen's gallery representative; 1984–Present); A.V.C. Contemporary Arts, New York, NY (2003); and Stremmel Gallery, Reno, NV (2010–Present).

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 1998, author and art critic Matthew Kangas wrote that Hansen's paintings reveal the artist's concerns about a natural environment under siege:

In 1987, Los Angeles Times art critic Suzanne Muchnic wrote that Hansen uses the Kernal as a device to insulate viewers from "a tension about this art--a rickety balance of nature and man-against-beast":

In 1985, Hansen's first retrospective exhibition, "Gaylen Hansen: The Paintings of a Decade, 1975-1985," was presented at the Museum of Art at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, and other art institutions. For the catalog that accompanied the exhibition, co-curator Bruce Guenther wrote:

In 1985, Hansen embraced characterizations of his expressionistic work as naïve:

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. The exhibition also travelled to the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in Barnsdall Art Park [1] and the Koplin Gallery.

Also in 1982, while working as a visiting artist at the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta, Canada, Hansen met Heidi Oberheide, a visiting artist from Newfoundland, who was teaching printmaking. They married in 1984.

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

Hansen recalled that his work "began to take on a more distinctive and personal look around 1975. However some of the earlier basic concepts and methods persisted, and still do."

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.

During the neo-expressionist boom of the 1970s, Gaylen Hansen came to the attention art world. His signature style was influenced by important 20th Century artists, art movements, and personal and cultural events.

In 1970, Hansen and wife Patricia moved into an old log roadhouse outside of Pullman, which he christened the "Country Club." The couple shared the Country Club with chickens, dogs, and ducks, and planted thousands of tulip bulbs.

During the mid-1970s, Hansen concluded that he was not destined to connect with "modern art or New York or any kind of mainstream developments." He decided that he "might as well do what amused me primarily. Prior to that I had been concerned about the rest of the art world."

During a sabbatical from WSU in 1966 and 1967, Hansen and Patricia visited Stinson Beach, California, 10 miles north of San Francisco. Hansen was exposed to Bay Area hippie counterculture and impressed by the work of such rising stars in the art world as Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Crumb, Robert Arneson, William T. Wiley, and "psychedelic artist" Peter Max.

Hansen's wife Shirley (Anderson) Hansen died in 1963. In 1965, Hansen married Patricia Cassidy.

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 described his and Baxter's investigations:

A former colleague, Robert Ecker, said Hansen, who "struggled with his Mormon youth all the time, was a convert to the 1960s" by the time he returned from his sabbatical.

Also during the 1960s, Hansen was introduced to the work of experimental American composer John Cage, whose explorations of chance and ambient sounds strongly influenced the artist.

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."

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).

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

In 1957, Hansen moved Pullman, Washington, to teach at Washington State University (WSU).

Since 1957, Hansen has lived in a geographically-odd area in Eastern Washington known as the Palouse. The other-worldly quality of the Palouse landscape and indigenous elements within it imbue Hansen's paintings with "the potential for magic and transformation."

From 1954 to 1957, Hansen taught at Yakima Valley College in Yakima, Washington, where he also supervised the Larson Gallery.

Between 1953 and 1954, Hansen worked as an illustrator at the Hancock Foundation at USC and made "fish drawings" for a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Later, Hansen noted that "I'm capable of quite good realism, believe it or not. I was a very accomplished draftsman, know anatomy thoroughly, could draw and articulate the figure well."

In 1952, Hansen earned a B.S. degree at Utah State College.

Also in 1952, Hansen commenced graduate studies at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He completed a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in 1953.

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."

Hansen later reflected that during the 1950s he "continued slugging it out with abstract expressionism, learning more what it was about but at the same time wondering why I was doing it."

In 1947, prior to earning his B.S. degree from Utah State College, Hansen became an instructor at the University of Texas, Austin, where he taught until 1952.

In 1945, Hansen enrolled in the University of Utah. The following year, he attended Utah State College in Logan on an art scholarship.

Hansen married his first wife, Shirley Anderson, in 1944.

In 1943, Hansen moved to New York City to study art and viewed works by modern artists including Henri Rousseau, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Marsden Hartley, and Matta Echaurren.

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.

Hansen returned to Salt Lake City in 1940 to work in a sign shop with Frank Bacher. They continued to paint together, doing "various kinds of modern painting." Later that year, Bacher moved to New York City and Hansen attended the Art Barn School of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, where he also taught a figure drawing class.

In 1940, Hansen taught his first art class, figure drawing, at the Art Barn School of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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."

In 1939, Hansen moved to Los Angeles to live with his mother and enrolled at the Otis Art Institute, a training institution for young artists who aspired to careers in academia.

In 1938, Hansen moved to Salt Lake City during his senior year of high school to care for Neils, who was stricken with cancer. During that period, Gaylen and a classmate, Frank Bacher, painted watercolors by the Jordan River. Neils died in the same year.

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." Hansen's grandfather discouraged Gaylen's interest in art. However, his father, Neils M. Hansen, a Harvard University-educated engineer who was wiped out during the Great Depression in 1929, had illustrated a self-penned book about his outdoor adventures and encouraged his son's budding interest.

Gaylen C. 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.

Gaylen Hansen was born in Garland, Utah, in 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.