Background
Ashley Hanson was born in Blackpool in 1960. After initially studying architecture, he took a degree in Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art. The principal at the time, Thomas Watt, has been a major influence on his work. After leaving Canterbury, Ashley spent the next twenty years in London, exhibiting widely and developing his art. In 1991 he was a prize-winner in the prestigious Hunting Art Prizes. He moved to Cornwall in 2005 to concentrate on his career and to be closer to the coastal landscape that inspires his work.
“I feel it was inevitable that I would eventually settle there: it was after seeing a Peter Lanyon exhibition in Manchester in 1978, that I decided to be a painter.’’
Like Lanyon, Ashley is particularly drawn to the unique shapes and imagery of coastal towns with their mix of the natural and man-made. Using complimentary colours his vibrant paintings are both powerful and refined. His paintings have been accurately described as ‘a harmony of opposites‘. Since moving to Cornwall he has made series about Porthleven, Padstow and the Fowey River.
The United States has been a constant influence on Ashley’s work. He first went there in 1992 to see the Matisse exhibition at MOMA in New York and then again in 1993 to participate in the Triangle Artists Workshop hosted by Sir Anthony Caro. Then in 1997, after being awarded a Boise Travel Scholarship from the Slade, he made a series of train journeys around the States before painting for two months in a barn in upstate New York, at the home of the sculptor Jon Isherwood.He has continued making work about this experience- there are now 32 paintings in the ‘Americascapes’ series. His recent series of works ‘The Englands’ has enabled him to interlink paintings inspired by the coastal landscape of Cornwall and New England.