Artist: Steve Hanks

Title: Connections

Medium: Lithograph on Paper

Limited Edition: 114/1250

Art Dimensions: 12 H x 28 W inches

Framed Dimensions: 17 H x 33 W inches


ARTIST BIO:

Steve Hanks is known for paintings that are meticulously drawn with great attention to detail and that reflect a moment in time, often a token of the artist's memory. The goal of the artist to achieve an interconnectedness between these moments and the viewer, allowing the viewer to reflect on his/her own favorite moments.

"Steve Hanks is a man driven by private passions," writes the author of an introductory biography to "Steve Hanks; Poised Between Heartbeats". "He never painted to sell, but only to survive and follow his star. Each painting is a momentary glimpse through the moving curtain that hides the secrets of his craft. Each painting is a mystery that needs to be sorted out and unraveled."

These words suggest something of the complexity that is Steve Hanks. A product of the turbulent sixties, he artistic vision first took him to hard-edged caricatures, and then moving through the artistic fads of the day, he finally settled on paintings of quiet celebration of the world around him, of what the he has termed "moments of introspective solitude." His intent is to reach out to the viewer and ask, "What are these subjects thinking? What are they feeling.?"

Hanks was born into a military family in San Diego in 1949 and grew up playing tennis and surfing along the beaches of Southern California. On his first grade report card, a teacher attached a prophetic note: "Steve is an artist." As time passed, this prediction would prove more and more accurate.

He has won numerous awards including in 1990, the Arts for the Parks Marine Art Award of Excellence. He has been a winner in the Arts for the Parks top 100 artists from 1989 to 1991. In 1991 the National Watercolor Society awarded him their Society Merit Award. In 1992, the National Academy of Western Art presented him with the Gold Medal in Watercolor.

Hanks' dedication to his art is validated by a lifetime of struggle and hard work to exploring, with a restless mind, new frontiers, always attempting to touch the unknowable with his art.

As Susan Hallsten McGarry, former editor of Southwest Art, writes: "Hanks is, first and foremost, a figure painter, following the line with such masters of the human form as Raphael, Rembrandt, Vermeer and Ingres. Through the effects of light on the figure, Hanks molds visions that convince us of the singular beauty of the human form as a meritorious subject in its own right."

Biography from Leslie Levy Fine Art, Inc.

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