Robert Hanna:  

s about what a mediocre, middle-class society believes is beautiful or ugly.There is an independent system of values that is deeply seated within you as an artist - and when you betray that you loose everything. You know! Interdisciplinary Artist living in Southern California, not married and with out children, not because I don't like Kids. I'm just to selfish to share my life with them. I live at WAV an art experimental work & live space (look it up). My art career began in the 9th grade at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta California. My art teacher Audi Love encouraged me at that time to enroll in an advance placement art class. From there I began signing up for figure drawing classes at Santa Barbara City College. This in evidently released my passion for other art forms leading me into sculpting, ceramics and painting. My interest was insatiable and I began attending art exhibits. My first exhibit was at the Contemporary Art Forum where I met Wayne Thiebaud a hero of mine. I Volunteered and took part in an Installation again at S.B.C.A.F., “Sea Full of Clouds “with Ceil Bergman and Nancy Merrill. I spent several years working as a drafter/ designer for engineering firms after high school. Unsatisfied with the repetitious and redundant work I packed up my belongings and went on the road. I traveled a good portion of the United States then went south to Mexico. I drove from Santa Barbara to Quintana Ro, from Belize to Brownsville Texas, all in the span of about two years. I soaked up as much of the culture as humanly possible. I studied the Mexican Muralist Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfero Siqueiros and of coarse Diego Rivera. I lived with the Maya in Chetumal (capital of Quintana Ro) and Xcalax A small village at the tip of Chetumal Bay. I Climbed the Pyramids of Chichen Itza, Palenque, and Tulum, recording every thing I saw on paper and film. I came back to Santa Barbara in 1989 ready to embrace my passion and determined to be an artist. I returned to Santa Barbara City College and enrolled in art classes. I started sculpting, glass blowing, metal work and stone carving. I also learned lost wax Bronze casting. At this point I was also living in a communal space with five other artists at the Working Building on State St. Volunteered at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Art Forum . I worked on getting my general education classes completed by 1990. I was accepted to and began attending the San Francisco Art Institute in 1991. At the art institute I studied under Paul Koss, John Rolfe, Robert Cadeluci, and many prominent -contemporary artists. I continued my stone craving and Bronze casting under my instructor Dan Santos in Oakland. At this time I held down three jobs painting houses in Sausalito, a barista at Top of the Hill Café and I monitored on Saturday at the Art Institute. In 1994 I also participated as a judge, on the committee to award the Diego Rivera Prize for S.F.I.A. I was also in several group shows and one solo exhibit in Gallery X. I received Merit Scholarships as well as the Santa Barbara Art Foundations Scholarships the four years I was attending S.F.I.A. I received my B.F.A, went back to Santa Barbara and I took part in groups shows. I had one solo show at Café Roma. I was then selected in the Atkinson Gallery’s Small Images exhibition in 1996, Curator Peter Frank. I also formed part of Rick Aber’s Installation “Washing Away My Footprints” I opened my own studio in 1997 at 407 Ventura ave. Ventura Ca., soon after I took a position at Clover Leaf Inc., as the apprentice to the Master Mold Maker. I Iearnd how to make high production polyurethane molds. This led into a new endeavor and the birth of a concrete pottery company” Foot Hill Pottery”. In 1999 I moved to Ojai Ca. I made Hundreds of concrete pieces from one gallon pots to 25 gallon estate vessels. All where inlayed with antique mosaic tiles. All was good until the internet crash in 2001. I attempted to wait out the lack of business and went bust. In 2002 I found my self designing and painting industrial- scale murals, from the Pacific Northwest, south to San Diego for a Graphics firm based out of Pasadena. I now paint Murals in a Tromp L ‘Oil style for private individual and company. In 2005 I passed the state contractors test receiving a c33 allowing myself the right to Paint and Decorate. I was then diagnosed with Ostia- atherides in my knees. In 2007 I began school at the Technology Development Department (TDC) here in Ventura California. I returned to school due to my knee injury. This venture back into education has served as an opportunity to brush up on my Auto CAD skills. While attending TDC full time I participated in three groups shows at the Artist Union Gallery in Ventura, as well as volunteer on Saturdays at Bell-Arts, teaching children art. I have continued to work even as my surroundings have become increasingly restrictive. The Laughing Heart your life is your lifedon’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch.there are ways out. there is a light somewhere. it may not be much light butit beats the darkness. be on the watch.the gods will offer you chances. know them.take them. you can’t beat death butyou can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it,the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelousthe gods wait to delightin you. -- by Charles Bukowski The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men. - Alice Walker Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. – Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot Be the change that you wish to see in the world. - Mohandas Gandhi Think occasionally of the suffering of which you spare yourself the sight. - Albert Schweitzer Non-violence leads to the highest ethics, which is the goal of all evolution. Until we stop harming all other living beings, we are still savages. - Thomas A. Edison We've got to take back the ideal of justice, we've got to take back this principle of human dignity. We've got to take it back from vengeance, from hatred, we've got to say: look, we're all in this together. We are human beings. - David Kaczynski ROBERT G. HANNA This show is so exciting for me for several reasons. These paintings are the result of my own invention – a technique that’s based on addition and subtraction and transcends the common product of either process. The addition involves the accumulation of sometimes as many as 20 layers of paint to the supporting surface, each layer representing facets of the historical drama of my life, my heritage, my politics and the substances with which I have personally wrestled, vascillating between dependence and liberation. My Coca Cola paintings, for example started with a layer in homage to my first sweet, carbonated addiction, covered with a layer of my second addiction symbolized by the dollar sign, covered with more Coke and then more money and then more Coke, each layer in various shades, until the layering creates a density not unlike the psychic weight of such addictions. Then - the inevitable subtractive process begins to tear away the veils, revealing new perceptions of historical layers and experiences through grinding and sanding, sometimes harsh abrasive revelations that lead to new points of view, previously unseen abstractions and complexities. Other paintings explore various juxtapositions, layering Coke with the phallic shape of meth pipes, religious crosses and the graffiti “tag” RGH, with which I sign and profoundly own each addiction as well as each resurrection as mine, and mine alone. I think of my paintings as sculptures in that the layering and sanding process creates new dimensions of experience and visual adventure. At one point I found myself looking through a magnifying glass at one of m