David Hanna had a fan base in the mid-Atlantic, where he got his start, though Jamie Hanna has Maine leads in Boothbay, Augusta, Wiscasset, and Down East.ĭavid Hanna appreciated old houses and antiques, sometimes taking his children to visit dealers as far away as Lincolnville. When she locates enough collectors in one place, the team travels to document pieces, spanning all the lower 48 states and even Scotland. She was helped early on by an introduction to fine art photographer John White, who makes reproduction-quality photographs of artwork for museums, along with an archivist who taught her how to document each piece. Jamie Hanna has located all the “low-hanging fruit,” and is now chasing down pieces that might be harder to find. “This just really expanded my life so much.” “The connections and relationships I’ve built have just been such a blessing, and an unexpected gift,” she said. The catalog is currently private, but some parts of it, minus collector information, would be published with an exhibition. “The whole project has this energy about it, as if we’re picking up from 1981 and everyone just remembers,” Jamie Hanna said.Īlmost everyone she’s contacted to ask about cataloging work has agreed, inviting her into their homes to photograph, record details, and note exhibition history for a catalog raisonne, or a complete annotated list of an artist’s works. One, blind since birth, remembered him describing his paintings to her and explaining what the color blue looks like. Though some paintings are now in the second or third generation of ownership, many collectors knew David Hanna well. “I’ve never thought, ‘What’s the next step?’” Some she has even found in the White Pages. When she set out to find them, she started with people she knew had purchased works, who connected her with others. His paintings are rarely seen at auction, according to his daughter. Upon his death, the family mostly had his early sketches, ephemera, and a handful of works created just for family members. “It sort of arrested a time in my life, and so I’m coming back to that now,” Jamie Hanna said. The memorial exhibit there that followed was the last one held of his art. “(David Hanna) was always very resourceful, very ambitious, very curious, and could figure things out,” she said.ĭavid Hanna father died of a heart attack 10 years later, when she was 16, while visiting a curator at the Westmoreland County Museum of Art in Greensburg, Pa. Jamie Hanna’s first memories are at the lighthouse, where the family lived until building a home together in Round Pond in 1971. Within a year, he was making a living from his art, and the family moved to the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse’s keeper apartment the next year, in 1967. The building manager noticed and invited him to join an exhibition, which kick-started Hanna’s career. Army Special Services in the airborne division and became an insurance salesman when he returned home.ĭavid Hanna began to paint to decorate his growing family’s Pittsburgh apartment. After marrying, he spent three years in the U.S. He left school as a young teenager and worked at a dance studio and as an actor. “I really started spending time at Pemaquid and rethinking our time here, why did we move here, what inspired him to be here.” “I really love the challenge of the breadcrumbs, and the investigation, and connecting the dots,” she said. She spent a year thinking about the project before launching the David Hanna Trust with the understanding that it would be a marathon, rather than a sprint – a marathon she said could be never-ending. He painted to support his wife and seven children, often selling on commission, and when he died at age 39 most of his work was in private hands.Ībout five years ago, his daughter had an “ah-ha” moment and began to see his art in a different way. “There was no preciousness to his process,” she said. She describes her father’s style as precise and unpretentious, holding a place in American art history. Jamie Hanna, who attended Lincoln Academy, has spent her adult life across the country and now splits her time between Annapolis, Md. Self-taught, he studied artists of the Brandywine School, an American realist artistic tradition that included the Wyeth family. ![]() While following international clues to bring his work to the public, hoping to organize his first exhibition since 1981, she has connected to her father, his relationships, and her own early life on the peninsula.ĭavid Hanna painted realist landscapes and portraits in watercolor and egg tempera using a drybrush technique. Jamie Hanna has spent the past five years locating and documenting hundreds of artworks her father, David Hanna, created during her childhood in Bristol and earlier years in Pennsylvania.
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