Hannah Lee: Looking into the Body

By Claire Schlaikjer

Hannah Lee directs us to the details: ankles and shoulders, lipstick on teeth. In her paintings, she points out the rhythm of hair pulled taut by a comb, or the creases of a straining wrist. Sometimes these details feel intimate; elsewhere, disquieting. Hands are languid or imposing, but we aren’t always sure which. 

We might be afraid of this raw skin and these angular bodies if it wasn’t all so luscious. Purple nipples, reflective tangerine-pink bottoms, mysterious green and mauve contours of flesh seen through black stockings — here the body is an iridescent specter that never fully comes into focus. 

Hannah was one of this year’s Big Medium LINE residency artists, and during her time there she created an entirely new body of work which was on show at Spellerberg Projects last month. Her recent paintings examine the body and its limitations with an honest curiosity and a characteristically scrupulous approach to form and technique. 

Tell me about your most recent body of work. How did it come to be, and what was on your mind as you were developing it?

The work that I was doing prior to the [LINE] residency was about the disconnect between who we truly are, how we present ourselves, and how we are perceived. I was more focused on seeing the other person, really seeing and listening, and how the quality of looking determines what we see. For the work I made at the residency, I wanted to focus more internally, on how I see myself and how I recognize other people see me, which I personally feel are very different. So I was celebrating who I am, and who I know myself to be, and also dealing with and accepting how other people view me. It was still in the realm of the work I was doing before, but with a more internal rather than external focus.

My show up at Spellerberg is called Magic Shell, for several reasons — one being that I absolutely love Magic Shell, that stuff that you put on ice cream that hardens. I was obsessed with that when I was little, but I never had it, so now as an adult I have ice cream sundaes three times a week because I’m like “I can do it now, I’m an adult.” And these paintings were also like me celebrating me, and being okay with me, and just leaning into me and the impulses that I have. And Magic Shell would be one of those! 

When I first got to the residency, the day I got there, I found out I was pregnant. I had a miscarriage, but it was good that I found out I can get pregnant — that was exciting. All of a sudden I was hit with this realization that our bodies are magic: the fact that I could grow a human — that’s wild. I think women have a lot of trouble with their bodies, everyone does. And I was realizing my body, this physical thing that I am, is magic, and I wanted to recognize that in my paintings. But then there was still this magic shell that I can’t control — the way other people see me. A lot of times I get put into this box that can be really frustrating. I’ve noticed it’s really hard for people to take me seriously. And it’s for things that I can’t control.

Your choice of color is something that is particularly striking to me about your work.

Well, first of all, color is amazing. There’s so many colors. Colors change based on what color they’re next to. So as a painter that has a very traditional background, and who has studied the science of color, that is a fascinating part of my process for me— just exploring that. But I also think a lot of my paintings can be unsettling to other people. I don’t want to sound like I’m making my work so that other people will like it, but I am also very aware of how other people perceive my work, and I want the concepts that I am exploring to be conveyed in a sophisticated way to the viewer. You have to acknowledge the viewer if you are trying to find mutual understanding.

Especially if mutual understanding is the subject of your work.

Right, absolutely. So I also think color is a great way to make a piece approachable. A lot of people can use color in a very gimmicky way, and it’s just like, here’s a rainbow and you’ll love it. I’m way more intentional with my color, but I do use it as a way to grab a viewer’s attention and to make them feel comfortable. And then once they’re actually looking at the piece, maybe they’ll be more open to experiencing something outside the realm of what they would normally be comfortable with.

I think you do that so well in the way you sumptuously render skin, and fabric, and sometimes objects. It is so inviting and beautiful, but then once you are looking you realize what you’re actually seeing — maybe it’s this awkward part of the body, or maybe the person doesn’t want to be looked at. Something that really came through for me when I first saw your work in person is how clear your technical foundation is in your color and brushwork. I was wondering if the ways you have been taught painting have influenced what you choose to paint?

I’m a bit all over the place, but I was raised by parents that have a very rigid structure. Both of them are very organized, and rule followers, and I am so grateful for that — it’s not instinctive for me at all. And I’ve learned that it is very important to learn the rules so that you can break them effectively. You can explore an idea so much better if you create boundaries for yourself to begin with. I like knowing the rules, because then I learn how to manipulate them in ways that express something new. I also think that people like structure in general, so even if people don’t understand the structure and technicality of my work, there is still something inherently structural about it that is safe for people. And then I try to push a little outside that line. I wanted to get my masters in painting at a school that really valued the technical process: the traditional way to paint. I think it’s more beautiful. The integrity of an idea you have can be reinforced by the integrity of how you use the materials that you are working with. Using paint in the wrong way, even if it’s compositionally sound, will cause things to fall apart if not everything is given as much attention as everything else. 

I’m curious if that foundation has influenced the content of your painting, as well as just the structure and the technique.

Definitely. My dad is a pathologist, so growing up he always had some sort of book in the back seat about the human body and anatomy and how things work. Anatomy has always been fascinating to me. Where I got my masters [New York Academy of Art], I was able to get a painting masters with a focus in anatomy—you can’t do that at very many places. I went to Philadelphia every Friday morning to dissect a cadaver. When you understand what’s going on underneath your skin and clothes, you are going to make a much better painting.

I can understand how beneficial that would be from the perspective of a structural understanding of anatomy, but did that exercise also give you a different relationship with the human body that manifested in your paintings in any way?

Yes. Ironically, I think that the more scientifically and structurally and academically you approach the human body, the more empathy you end up feeling towards it. One thing that was so fascinating to me in that class was that it would say “cadaver #9" died at this age, of this condition, but it would also say what their profession was. One woman was a court stenographer her whole life, and you could look at her hands, and you could totally see that that was what she did. Whatever we love, or whatever we do, our bodies reflect that. I’ve always painted from a live model, and there would be poses that were more difficult to hold. Seeing what muscles would start to twitch — it’s way more difficult than people think, to model — and seeing how the body gives and pulls and challenges, you develop way more empathy for the body when you understand how it fully works, inside and out. 

What is your relationship to working from life versus reference images? Is that something that has changed since graduating and not having that same kind of access to models?

Yes, not working from life has been really frustrating. For the work I was doing before, I was making it up. They were all portraits and for the most part I was just creating them out of my imagination, which was a really good exercise for me. That was fun. For this recent work, I had ideas and I would start piecing different resources together, but I realized that I had no physical or emotional connections to this source material that I was pulling together. It was a problem, so I had my talented friend Ransom Ashley, who is a photographer, help me set up these ideas and make reference images. It was so much easier to paint once I had an experience making the image. I felt more connected to it.

How do you decide which parts of a person you focus on? What catches your attention when you are making those choices?

I think I choose different parts of the body depending on what I am trying to say. In the portraits I did that were blurry, I wanted them to be a person that demanded your attention, as if you were forced to acknowledge them. But I also wanted the viewer to feel like they were being seen by the painting. And in that case it’s really important for there to be eyes! So it felt like having a portrait with a central composition which is very impactful was important, and I wanted them to be large in size so that they felt like they had power over the viewer and the viewer couldn’t ignore them. 

With these recent pieces, I wanted them to feel a little bit mundane, but also have a surreal element to them, and I wanted to explore femininity. I wanted there to be things that normally wouldn’t be highlighted, and I wanted to present them in really fleshy ways because it had to do with my body. I wanted to allude to that idea of feeling small. Like that painting [of a hand on the back of a head] – I titled it “there there”, because the person could be comforting me, but the person could also be demeaning and a little controlling. I wanted it to go either way. It’s not just about what part of the body you use, but how that part of the body is interacting with what’s around it. 

I’m interested in how you attempt to visually manifest this feeling that you’re interested in, of alienation and the ways that we fail to connect with each other. 

When I did this [The LINE] residency, I said “I’m not going to second guess myself, I’m just going to go with impulse.” So a lot of what I was painting at the time, I didn’t really know why I was painting it. Then looking back at them I noticed a lot of hidden faces, a lot of weird, mundane cropped compositions, a lot of hands, and a lot of flowers — which was weird to me, because that’s not something I would usually go toward. It was weird to almost objectively look at my own work and see these symbols that kept coming up, and I didn’t really know why. I spent a day just looking up all the symbols that I had painted. It’s so interesting, our subconscious minds. It really was this affirmation that there is something outside of us putting energy into us. I had done a painting of a lily, and I had no idea why, and it was very different from everything else. It was the painting I started after my grandma passed away, which doesn’t seem like it would have any connections, but I looked up lily, and lily is a funeral flower that represents safe passage into the next realm. I felt like the fingers [inside the flower] were holding something very delicate, and ironically her ring, which I always loved, was in the shape of a flower. It was like all these things were connecting through me. I named that painting “Safe Passage” because I learned why I painted that, and I didn’t know at the time. 

Which artists, or experiences of seeing art, have particularly influenced you?

So many! I love Käthe Kollwitz. I think she’s maybe the best draftsman of all time. Her hand is very heavy, which I relate to, but she paints such delicate and relatable things about being a woman, in this very aggressive but also incredibly vulnerable way. I love Giacometti, and how he describes his work — when he would paint the viewer, he wanted to paint their soul. And you see it. His technical narrative mirrors the narrative he wants to get across, him constantly searching for that person’s soul, so I think that that’s very powerful. Félix Vallotton is another favorite, and I recently saw Naudline Cluvie Pierre’s new show up at Jeffrey Deitch gallery, and it is bar far one of the best shows I have ever seen.

What do you plan to work on next? 

I’m going to keep exploring the same subject matter that I did in my residency — I have a lot more ideas for that. That work was like dipping my toe into new waters, so they all were smaller and more like studies. I want to start pushing scale again. Everything is more impactful when it’s larger — when it’s small, the viewer can possess it, but when it’s large the viewer feels possessed by the painting.

What about any dream projects in the far future that you hope to someday realize?

As long as I can paint my whole life, and make a living off of it, which I’ve been able to do since the day I graduated college, I’ll be happy. I feel very lucky to have been able to get away with this! I paint all the time, and I work really hard, but it’s super worth it.

See more of Hannah’s work on her website hannahleeart.com, and on Instagram @hannahleeart.