Line by Line- New Criticism and Word Art

Philip Hanson “The World is Charged with the Glory of God (Hopkins)” 2010 oil on canvas 30 x 30

In the Citizen Hack assignment, many of us found unique ways to do close reading and annotations of Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.  Some of us used traditional annotation methods while others incorporated quotes and excerpts from other sources, created erasure poems with the text, framed the text with images of our own, or super imposed our own words on top of Rankine’s.  As it turns out, we aren’t the only ones using word art to do close reading of poems; Chicago artist Philip Hanson has been exploring the relationship between texts and image in his psychedelic paintings for the past 20 years.  He integrates excerpts from poems by Emily Dickinson, William Blake, William Shakespeare, and other Romantic poets into the intricate and richly colored patterns of his paintings.  Hanson creates new meaning behind the worlds by framing them within his paintings. He uses the structure of the letters to influence his design and the meaning of the texts to inspire the meaning behind his work.  Hanson studied poetry at the University of Chicago where the New Criticism movement had a strong impact on him, and this is reflected in his work.  Line by line, he performs a type of close reading through his painting.  Like our annotations of Rankine’s Citizen, Hanson dissects the poem to understand its meaning, and he communicates this analysis through his art work.

Philip Hanson “He whose beauty is past change (St. Thomas Aquinas)” 2011, oil on canvas, 18 x 18 inches

Hanson’s evolution as an artists is briefly described by John Yau in “Late Bloomer: Philip Hanson’s Recent Paintings.” Hanson has been a fairly well-known artists since his participation in the False Image exhibit in Chicago in 1968, but Yau describes how his work never had a comparable “visual oomph” of his contemporaries unlit the mid ‘90s when he began integrating poems into his work.  “At first, he incorporated entire poems, but by the beginning of this century he was working in series, which required the the break a poem down, with one line per painting” (Yau). The progression and integration of New Criticism in Hanson’s poem-image paintings can be traced through time.  In the earlier works, the words of the poem are very distinct and the paintings are, as Yau describes them, “diagrammatic,” but in the later works, the diagrammatic analysis of the poem is absorbed by the image- achieving an entirely new level of word-image integration.  Hanson reframes how we read and interact the poem- the direction we read, how we tilt our heads- what words we read first, and what we see first and last; altering and highlighting different aspects of the texts.

Hanson’s work has inspired me to ask several new questions about the texts we have studied this semester:

• Hanson has used poems by William Blake, the original word artist, in several paintings.  What are the consequences of removing Blake’s texts out of their word-image relationship and reframing them in this new medium? Is this any different than other word artist integrating images into their text; for example, Claudia Rankine using Turner’s Slave Ship in Citizen (Also, in case you did not know this, Turner also first exhibited his Slave Ship with a poem he composed? Is removing it from this context have different effects than some of the other word art and book hacks we have studied this semester?)
• Here is an excerpt from Yau’s article on Hanson’s work:
  “It seems to me that each time Hanson incorporates this poem into a painting, he is in effect offering a different reading through his placement of the words, his shifts in scale and color, his investigation of the figure-ground relationship, and the light with which he chooses to flood the space. In effect, he is using formal pictorial means to both diagram and represent the peom. I found myself shifting between reading and looking with neither one overwhelming the other, an experience that one does not have while looking at the work of other artists who use text in their work.”This reminds me of our class dissection on the meaning of “word”,“image”, “writing”, and “illustrating”.   I made another Continuing Conversations Post on this discussion, but this quote from Yau struck me.  What is the difference between reading and looking? What is the line that has to be crossed, and how does Hanson play with that line? What aspects of his work allow him to succeed at this where other word artists have failed?
• In his paintings, Hanson is essentially annotating each line of these famous poems.  How is his method similar and different from our recent annotations in the Citizen Hack?  How could we improve or change our approaches to our hacks to make them better or more effective- what does this even mean really?  How can we do honor to the texts while annotating it? Is Hanson showing honor to these texts through his painting analysis or are his alterations and incorporations of these lines imposing upon the meaning of the poem?
• What would we think if Hanson created paintings from Rankine’s Citizen? What would we imagine them to look like and how would their creation make us feel?

References and Resources for Learning:
Cohen, James. “Philip Hanson – Artists – James Cohan Gallery.” Philip Hanson – Artists – James Cohan Gallery. Web. 26 Mar. 2016.
Dempsey, Jim, and John Corbett. “Philip Hanson – Corbett vs. Dempsey.” Corbett vs Dempsey Philip Hanson Comments. Corbett vs Dempsey. Web. 26 Mar. 2016.
“Portrait of the Artist: Philip Hanson.” Newcity Art. Newcity Communications, Inc., 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 26 Mar. 2016.
Johnson, Ken. “Review: Philip Hanson’s Poetic Fragments, a Trippy Synthesis of Visual and Verbal.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 24 Mar. 2016. Web. 26 Mar. 2016.
Yau, John. “Late Bloomer: Philip Hanson’s Recent Paintings.” Hyperallergic RSS. Hypoallergenic Media, Inc., 2014. Web. 26 Mar. 2016.