Coming Soon: Mia Hansford

"I am a southerner by bone and birth and a northerner by imagination and rebirth.

I love the woods, wild places, and the human figure and it’s energy.

I love the “energy” of things perhaps more than being able to depict exactly what things “appear” to be. Narrative is important, too, but not in the nice, tidy story sense.

Jessica Bruce is right. Art does live in everyday objects -and in the ones we handle and surround ourselves with -and it lives in the objects we use to create ritual and passage. This is an idea I hope to explore more this year. But right now, the immediacy of drawing the figure has me in its grasp, and has enabled my heart to keep pulsing as I met other obligations.

I draw the body, and sometimes the musicians at events in my lively little town. I work with portraits, some still life and abstractions. But when I teach classes is when I realize that what I really love. The elemental exercises I learned at Parsons School of Design and at The New York Studio School - so simple, classical, so seemingly bland yet crunchy and mathematical - are tools I cannot forget. They help me measure what I see and feel and have been artists’ guides for centuries.

With a tiny concrete pencil or viewfinder, with squinting and judging value and tone -no matter quickly or methodically I use these tools, my voice still comes through (at least in my mind). I see this like an alchemy with young students all the time. They get it. They get their uniqueness and they get the usefulness of the concrete and the classical.

Okay, so I’m rambling. This is not quite a bio, more like a grey and white mockingbird with a cup of tea warbling about viewfinders and shade and tone. I feel so happy to be among the women who first opened up the larger world to me at Wheaton College. I hope you like the drawings and the amazing art work of all kinds of media here at Encounter Artists.

Nude woman 

Gesture drawing.

Jazz

pastels