Painting is the obsession and passion of my lifetime. Each work is a new invention. A unique visual experience to every person who gives a work a home or happens to glance its way. As I come to the completion of a painting I sense an original spirit infusing the composition. The many years of my work and study of fine art served me well and I feel my paintings show the result of intense private scrutiny and concentration. I have worked for the past twenty-five years without showing my work because I devoted myself to parenting my two sons with my wife which resulted not so much in a reduction in the work but in the amount of time and money needed to market and sell my paintings as I had been successful with in the years before. This decision was the best of my life and the education gleaned from being close with my family and trying the best I could for them was most valuable in every way including the way I approach painting today.

I believe seeking peace is the highest of priorities one should have within their life goals. I try. When I think of what I would most like you the viewer to come away from a work of mine with is a sense of enjoyment and a little more peaceful than when it first attracted your attention. I also hold that a work of art should be alive and for it to stay alive a person should see or sense something original with each new viewing.

Jerry Hanks

A Few Comments

Flaking, chipping and cracking paint in my extreme low-rent childhood home revealing glimpses, portions and hints of all the layers and colors that came before mutely telling a history and causing wonder about the people who may have made the decisions to paint and the colors to use. Rain on a windowpane the droplets, drips and runs converging and dividing as they refract the light and reflect an upside-down version of everything around providing amusement and wonder for a very bored and very poor little boy.

Bark peeling from trees. The cracks, chips and stains of many colors over sidewalk and roadway surfaces. All the random patterns and tinted shades of nature. These were early influences upon me. They are the primary influence upon my work today.

I also find so much interest in the archeology of current history. And these interests were the muse for developing my techniques for collages and layered paintings. Little clues left behind as we go through our day. The composition of discarded clothing on a bedroom floor inspires me because it speaks of the history of only hours ago yet it is the past already. A part of history to be remembered or forgotten. My work is personal in inspiration but speaks for all in terms of the private worlds in which we exist.

OUTSIDER ARTIST?

I've always been challenged when someone asks the age-old question regarding what kind of work I do as an artist. To say Abstract Expressionism sounds good and could apply to some of my works. The same could be said for many of the titles attributed to certain styles of painting. I've noticed the term of Outsider Artist popping up over the past few years and I assumed it implied primitive art which I adore and some works of mine would fit into the genre. I was wrong. Through research I have found that Outsider Artist essentially means a self-educated person who for some medical or physical chronic problem found themselves separated from the middle-class life and pretty much on their own. Some of these people turn to the art that was always at the core of their spirit functioning outside the normal artistic community and, for the most part, outside the norms of middle-class.

A partial quote from the artist Jean Dubuffet states that this kind of art is produced by "people unsmirched by artistic culture, works in which mimicry, contrary to what occurs with intellectuals, has little or no part. So that the makers draw entirely upon their own resources rather than the stereotypes of classical or fashionable art."

Bottom line, to me, is the Outsider Artist is self-taught and works independently producing works of a highly personal nature while appealing to the public by the unique character of the work. So, I have found a tag that fits well and feels comfortable because it best describes me and my work.

I have painted since childhood and at times in my life have struck out on my own to paint. Chronic pain from a disease called Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy in my arms and hands have forced me to leave my secure middle-class employment and left me on my own. I immediately turned to painting every moment and hour the pain and life will allow. Painting is now my life, always my passion, as I have dreamed since five years old. I just never thought it would happen this way.  I can only seek to increase the quality of my work in relation to the reduction in quanity I must forgo.

Jerry Hanks