The Berkeley Beacon

Issue date: 11/20/08 Section: Arts and Entertainment

Media Credit: courtesy of bigredandshiny.com Hankey's House by the Pool #2 painting.

Saunter into the Sister Sorel restaurant, also known as Tremont 647, and enjoy a surprising art exhibit of both surreal and humanistic caliber.

An amalgamation of experimentation, Bradley Hankey’s exhibit titled Faces and Places leaves little to be desired. Within the small, intimate setting of the Sorel exhibit, his works are divided into both of the title categories.

The restaurant showcases his adaptations of natural landscapes and urban settings at the entrance. Half these so-called places capture random skyscrapers and buildings of Boston, expressed using angular lines, clean, vibrant rectangles and jarring simplicity.

At first glance, there is nothing particularly noteworthy about these pieces; in fact, they could easily pass off as curiously mundane art deco, cut down into childlike shapes and lacking any uniquely creative characteristics.

But a closer look reveals the fundamental building blocks of his paintings create a sophisticated and urban look, without the clutter of dots and details. The texture of the paint popping off sleek pillars and slanted rooftops, and the careful shading of walls and windows, provide viewers with a bare-bones look at a normally chaotic scene, asking them to appreciate it for its essential beauty.

At the opening reception for his new exhibit, Hankey told The Beacon, “It’s more about what I’m interested in, which is planes of color, geometric planes of color, which you find in cityscapes. They are based on what I’m seeing, but simplified, and that’s what I am interested in, color upon color upon color.”

The other half of Hankey’s Places offers much softer depictions of the striking scenes he visited during his travels to Vietnam and Costa Rica between 2005 and 2007. Nearly all of his more exotic works display hues so meshed together that transitions between one object and another are just barely discernible. Realism is clearly out of the question.

“My work is an abstraction of light and space and emotion,” Hankey explained. “I try to interpret those things through color and spatial relationships.” One painting in particular, titled “Lang Co Beach,” drapes the early dawn so delicately on a Vietnam bay that the lightest tints of peach, lilac and indigo are only minutely divided by faint waves of pearly white, in a chiffon of similar shades.

The 29-year-old artist, a native of Cottage Grove, Ore., has been studying and working in Boston since 2002. He received a BFA in Painting at the Massachusetts College of Art in 2007, and currently attends the Artist’s Professional Toolbox, a professional development program organized by the Volunteer Lawyers for Artists of Massachusetts, Inc. He recently presented exhibitions in galleries as far and wide as Costa Rica and Tanzania.

Even more impressive than the places, however, are the surreal features of numerous faces found in the back room of the venue. Each of the subjects is a friend or acquaintance that posed for the portrait individually, Hankey said, a few of which were present at the reception. The portraits boast distinct, psychedelic color schemes and expressive, iridescent contrasts, while retaining an element of unexpected sincerity. Facial features are mottled blue, pink, yellow or brown, the contrasts used to mirror shading and lighting in true-life portraits. Hankey is so liberal with his palette, he allows for eccentric, vibrant depictions that retain lifelike qualities in their countenances as opposed to their color compositions.

Some palette choices, like in “Laura,” are compelling in their play with the patchwork of almost ideal skin tones, in an abstracted tiling of human-hued pigments. Others, like “Lisa,” venture into the world of multifaceted, polychrome epiphanies, leading down the rabbit hole where reds and whites are interchangeable. So how does Hankey decide on the colors?
“It’s based on the sitter,” he admits. “I don’t know what color palette I’m going to use until I draw them. It’s an
organic process.”

Sometimes Hankey will start by asking his inspiration to name a favorite color, and pick up painting from there.

The most intriguing characteristic of each painting is the naturalness of the eyes, the only realistic element of these portraits. Taken out of their colorful contexts, each pair of eyes has the freeze-frame look of a Polaroid picture.

Hankey explained, “In order to bring the sitter into the portrait, I had to paint their real eyes. It’s their real eye color, [which makes it] humanistic.”

On a canvas of extreme opposites and paranormal skin tones, each iris serves as a visual anchor, grounding the portraits down to earth. Without humanistic eyes, the portraits would run the risk of losing their audience to an overload of abstraction. As an inclusive and decisive breach from the surrounding style, they create a connection, and invite viewers to intake a completely new idea by settling into familiarity.

Hankey seems to have touched upon a link between the real and the surreal, bringing a whole new meaning to beauty in the eye of the beholder. 



Hankey’s exhibit will be showing at the Sister Sorel from Nov. 10 through Dec. 7, 2008.

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