Stephen Hannock

Stephen Hannock (b. 1951) is one of the most distinctive American landscape painters working today, whose luminous, meticulously layered pictures carry forward the tradition of the Hudson River School and nineteenth-century American Luminism into the contemporary moment. Born in Albany, New York, he pursued his undergraduate studies at Bowdoin College and received his MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he has maintained close ties to western Massachusetts throughout his career.

Hannock is celebrated for the distinctive technique that gives his paintings their signature glowing surfaces. He builds up dozens of layers of oil paint on his supports, then sands down each successive layer with power tools before adding the next, producing surfaces of remarkable depth and luminosity in which the light seems to come from within the picture rather than from across it. This laborious method produces a kind of atmospheric magic that recalls the great American Luminist tradition of Frederic Church, Fitz Henry Lane, and Martin Johnson Heade while remaining unmistakably contemporary in its ambition. Many of his paintings also incorporate hand-lettered text embedded directly into the surface, personal notes, quotations, and reflections that give each picture a diary-like intimacy alongside its grand landscape presence.

Hannock's subjects include the Connecticut and Deerfield rivers, the mountains of the Northeast, dramatic skies at dusk, and other landscapes that have long occupied the American imagination. His paintings are held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and other leading American collections. He has also worked extensively in film, including the celebrated flooded river landscape for the 1998 film What Dreams May Come, and he has painted portraits and commissioned works for a range of prominent public figures. He remains one of the most respected contemporary voices within the American landscape tradition.