Phil Hansen is not only
tearing down the gallery walls that keep many people from seeing
and enjoying art. Hes also showing us how its made -- all on the
Internet.
By KEVIN SITES, FRI JUL 13, 11:51 AM
PDT
Phil Hansen stubbornly adheres to one artistic cliche. He's willing
to suffer for his art.
Take the giant portrait he made of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il
as a protest against nuclear proliferation. He applied 6,000
adhesive bandages on a plywood backdrop. Then, using a quart-sized
bag of his own blood, he painted Kim's face on the exposed gauze.
His sister-in-law, a doctor, helped him draw the 500ml he
needed.
Hansen shrugs off the experience.
"Five hundred cc's of blood seems like a lot, but it's just
nothing," he says from the basement of his brother's house outside
St. Paul, Minnesota, where he currently lives and makes his art. "I
don't even have scars on my arms anymore from it."
It's not the suffering that really distinguishes Hansen's work
(after all, it's hard to top Van Gogh) but his style and method for
displaying it. Hansen eschews galleries, preferring to take his art
directly to the eyeballs rather than bringing the eyeballs to the
art through the Internet.
An art school dropout, Hansen works as an X-ray technician by day,
spending all of his spare time and money on his art. But his work,
and his method of presenting it, has given him a huge
audience.
His breakthrough piece was a time-lapse video of a two-day project
called "Influences." He painted 30 pictures on his own chest, one
over the other, with each picture representing an influence in his
life. When he was done, he peeled the quarter-inch thick layer of
paint from his skin and cut out a silhouette of his own profile.
The video was streamed more than a million times on the Web a
cyber art phenomenon in which both process and final piece were
revealed.
Hansen often uses the technique of pointillism, in which the canvas
is dabbed with tiny bits of color, rather than fluid brush strokes,
to create a larger image.
But he gives pointillism a modern twist. You might call it "kinetic
fragmentism" pointillism in motion.
For instance, Hansen completed an on-camera piece of paint-dipped
karate chops to reveal a portrait of martial arts legend Bruce
Lee.
Hansen's Ku Klux Klan piece aims to provoke questions about
religion.
His works often have a political stance. Several years ago, Hansen
devised an image of President George W. Bush by hand-painting the
names of 1,700 coalition soldiers killed from the beginning of the
Iraq War until April 2005.
"They're dying for George Bush," he explains. "They're dying for an
idea that he had and unfortunately it wasn't a clear idea."
Covering the entire back wall of his brother's basement is a 7 x 14
foot mural of the Ku Klux Klan, made up from thousands of verses
copied from the bible and individually cut out. It's a companion
piece to an image of civil rights hero Rosa Parks also made from
bible verses.
Hansen says the idea was to show the far-reaching influences of
religion for both evil and good.
Hansen's commitment to his own brand of pointillism is most evident
in a portrait of the so-called Green River killer, Gary
Ridgeway.
He made the piece by drawing one-inch portraits of each of
Ridgeway's 48 female victims in various shades of light and dark.
He then photocopied the drawings and cut them out into 12,000 tiny
squares which he arranged, one by one, to reveal the killer's
face.
Hansen says it's about remembering the victims women all
connected by the misfortune of having crossed paths with Ridgeway.
The project took four months.
The detail work has taken its toll. Hansen holds up his right hand
to show me a twitch he says he's had since high school, when he was
first introduced to pointillism and became obsessed with it.
Hansen created his self-portrait 'A Moment' over the course of six
days, oven sitting cross-legged for up to 12 hours straight.
His latest project used the Internet to connect his viewers to the
art being created. He created a ten-foot, spinning, circular canvas
in his brother's garage, then moved in there himself. Taking a week
off work, he spent six days straight living in front of his web
cam, sleeping on the floor, eating takeout and encouraging people
to call him or email him with a "moment" that changed their
lives.
"I'm really interested in how all of our experiences build together
to create whatever world we live in," he said before starting the
project.
He got over 600 responses. People from all over the world, from the
United Kingdom to Romania to Botswana, told him their personal
moments: their first time acting on stage; the death of a parent
without being about to say goodbye; seeing the rainforest
destroyed.
Starting from the center of the canvas, Hansen then painted their
words, working out to the edges until the image they had
collectively created was a face Hansen's own bordered by four
hands.
"There's always someone or something, maybe even ourselves,
supporting us," Hansen tells me by phone, shortly after completing
the piece. "But at the same time there is some experience... trying
to push us down. And somehow, as we move through life, most people
end up kind of staying in the center, in the middle through that
experience."
Strangely, Hansen says the jitter in his hand that has plagued him
for so many years went away while he was making the piece.
To view Phil Hansen's works
http://philinthecircle.com/
Source: http://potw.news.yahoo.com/s/potw/23115/strokes-of-genius
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His works are really interesting. Likes this below:
Name: 1400 Celsius
Created: 3-2005
How: 2x4's were lined up to look like framework of a house. They
were organized to create a solid mass from one point of view. A
blow torch was then used to burn in the image of a fire fighter. As
you walk around this piece the picture is only visible from one
point of view.
Size: 96" x 96"