Review: Gaylen Hansen show of new works at Linda Hodges Gallery

In recent paintings by Gaylen Hansen, one of the greatest living Northwest painters (and, in his late 80s, one of the oldest), you'll see many of his recurring figures: a cowboy (named "The Kernal"), wolflike dogs, tulips, gloves, and ... ducks. And while it's very tempting to psychoanalyze these characters, sometimes a duck is just a duck, or perhaps even less ... an accumulation of brush strokes that become a figure that rests in a certain place on the canvas.

For decades, viewers have been beguiled by Hansen's paintings, which combine edgy expressionism with stylized, almost caricaturized, figures. But the artist has insisted that formal issues — recently, figure/ground relationships — are his primary interests. When highlighting salient elements in "Two Ducks and One Black Glove" (2009), the artist pointed out that one of the ducks stands on a kind of horizon line, while the other stands on the glove, just above the line.

You can imagine how this subtle difference amused the artist in his Eastern Washington studio, but it's true: the shift in placement makes the animals exist on slightly different planes and gently tweaks our perception of the space within the painting. And the glove? Well, Hansen often includes them, playing up the qualities that are both stiff and plump. The glove becomes a still-life object in the center of the painting; the green colors echo the green on the ducks' heads and the glove's yellow stitchery picks up the vast yellows of the background and provides gentle directional forces, leading the eye up and over to the left.

Even so, as viewers, it's our right to interpret as we may. According to Linda Hodges, Hansen's longtime gallery representative, the artist often wears this kind of glove while working. The glove can be seen as a symbol of labor, referring to both artistic work and the farm work that Hansen grew up doing in Utah, and that permeates Eastern Washington, where he has lived since the 1950s when he became an instructor at Washington State University. The inclusion of the ducks reinforces this connection with the land and brings a sense of liveliness to the image.

Once a more purely abstract painter, Hansen has said that he began including animals, and figures like The Kernal, in order to open up new compositional possibilities through combinations of these figures and the open-ended narratives that they suggest. The Kernal came into being after Hansen had been working with a bent-leg motif, which came to reside in a fort (Fort Bentleg), which, in turn, needed a colonel (Kernal Bentleg). The Kernal rides through open terrain, reminiscent of the stripped-down spaces of the Palouse or the Arizona desert, where Hansen spends time each year.

We could go on about the lone figure: is this Hansen's alter ego, the artist setting out to explore? But this painting is also about figure set against the "ground" — the compositional kind that is created on a canvas — so it's important to visually ride through the whole painting, taking in Hansen's masterful, moving brushwork.

At Linda Hodges Gallery, the 2009 paintings are chock-full of Hansen's signature characters and artistic approaches. But, according to the artist, his paintings from the last few years have been more immediate and spontaneous, with a looser, more painterly feel. There are also more small-scale works (2 by 2- ½ feet) than we've seen in other shows, including the retrospective at the Seattle Art Museum in 2007.

It's gratifying to see the power, charm and sense of flat, but welcoming, space come through in the small works, just as immediately as they do in the large ones. Ultimately, this is what makes Hansen such a strong artist: we can enter into his paintings to find an abundance of visual stimulation, a touch of narrative intrigue, and even a little bit of danger (with those wolflike dogs and magpies all around), without getting lost in overworked compositions, murky depths or convoluted interpretations of something like a duck.