Artist Phil Hansen: Redraw Your Own Boundaries

Artist Phil Hansen built his early work on painstaking pointillism. He was in art school when he developed a tremor in his drawing hand. It looked like the end of his career; his style depended on precision and patience, and his hand would no longer cooperate. Came the blunt verdict from a neurologist: permanent nerve damage, the kind that made the fine, detailed work that defined his early career impossible.

It is the kind of news that immediately forces you to reevaluate your life. “I found myself staring at a wall,” Hansen told Tuesday’s afternoon General Session attendees. It seemed that art was no longer an option until that same blunt neurologist offered an equally blunt piece of advice.

“Embrace the shake.”

When the Tool Breaks, Get New Tools

With those words came an eventual realization: Hansen’s art career wasn’t over. The road hadn’t ended. The horizon simply changed.

Shortly after that fateful doctor’s appointment, Hansen was up late watching the Bruce Lee classic Enter the Dragon. With his hands no longer suited for pointillism, Hansen was struck by another idea. He created a portrait of Bruce Lee using the sides of his hands, literally karate chopping paint onto a canvas until it formed Lee’s face.

That sparked another idea, a series of pieces Hansen called “Goodbye Art.” The concept? Create art intended to be destroyed immediately after completion – including a portrait of Jimi Hendrix made of matchsticks, which disappeared in a plume of smoke when lit, or one made entirely of frozen red and white wine that melted into oblivion. All told, Hansen created – and destroyed – 23 pieces of art.

“Destruction seems brave,” he said. “It’s about learning to let go. It was the most creative I’ve ever been.”

Engineers Get Creative; Hilarity Ensues

The stage set, Hansen then told Fall Conference attendees that it was their turn to make art of their own by completing a series of tasks using an app. The first task was easy: write your name using a supplied stylus. The next was a bit trickier: draw your pet. (Nervous giggles.) Then a curveball: write down your biggest worry (all anonymous) and sketch a design around it. Now, color the box completely black and draw something you can’t live without.

“Finally,” Hansen said, “I would like you to look across your table, find someone you don’t know – and draw them.”

The earlier nervous giggles become full-on uncomfortable laughter.

The collaboration part over, Hansen then showed some of the drawings. They ranged from quite impressive to cartoonishly awful, but this wasn’t an exercise designed to surface an undiscovered virtuoso. When the attendees’ collective artwork was finally pulled together, it became a composite of the Hoover Dam. There’s a lesson here. The whole is always worth more than its parts, and what we build together outlasts anything we could carry alone.

Hansen closed his presentation by sharing one last piece of his art, the idea for which came to him as he was driving home with a greasy bag of fast-food burgers. When he saw that the grease had changed the color of the bag, he decided to try to create art using nothing but hamburgers. He showed a video of the work in progress: dozens of hamburgers, which Hansen strategically pressed against the canvas until a familiar face emerged. When he was done, he had produced a replica of the Mona Lisa, appropriately titled the Mona Grease-a.

Reproducing masterpieces where the medium is medium-rare is about as far as possible from where Phil Hansen’s art career began. The exacting work of pointillism is no longer in the cards. But Hansen’s story is a reminder that what feels like an ending is often just a beginning we haven’t discovered yet.

“The key to rethinking is learning the difference between limitation and self-limiting belief.”