Lucas Adcock
Staff Writer
Caroline Hanson has been an artist since the day she was born, taking after her moth-er and grandmothers who taught her art techniques from a young age. Growing up in a family of artists, there was no question of what she wanted to do.
Hanson later attended the School of the Art in Chicago, earning her BFA and sparking the start of a rich career in art where she studied cast iron foundry, working in bronze, aluminum and iron foundries for the next 12 years, even teaching foundry and helping sculptors cast their work.
This 12-year focus on foundry took her from Chicago to Minneapolis, during which she also worked with welding and metal sculpting.
“I worked for the science museum as a sculptor and a fabricator,” Hanson explained, also revealing that she’d even made it into an art show with 80 individuals selected from 800 applicants. A truly incredible accomplishment. Following the 12-year span, she found her way back close to her roots, this time returning with a six-month old child.
“I quickly discovered that it is just not okay to ever weld or forge or do any of the metal arts, really, with babies around,” she said, “no matter what kinds of welding screens or play pens you come up with.”
So she shifted her career into something more personal, more family derived.
“My grandmother handed down a printing press, so I’d transitioned to relief printing.”
This unique method of printing – one amongst many – calls for carving either wood or linoleum to make a picture when it is pressed.
“I’m really drawn toward the relief printing, because of the use of chisels and tools, and I like the subtractive quality of it – being able to really engage with the material.”
When she’s not relief printing, she focuses on commercial work, which entails commissions for shows and artists and musicians.
“I also do some portrait work for people, with pet portraits and people portraits,” she said. “And I’m just wrapping up a six-month stay-at-home residency.”
This impressive career has led her in a direction that allows her to focus on her portfolio of work, which allowed her to dive into more “surrealism” artwork as well. Much of her work before the residency had focused on Appalachian imag- ery and identity, but has now had a very heavy dose of surrealism thrown in.
On top of everything she does, she also works for the Pocahontas County Opera House, running front-of-house operations for shows, bookkeeping, and more. She also writes grants during grant season. This year, she’s put forth the idea for an aluminum casting workshop in Marlinton that would be a community built, public sculpture.
Her deepest passion, which she will return to in time, is foundry casting. While she already has a small aluminum and bronze foundry, she said she’s “in the process of buying part of an old bell foundry that will have a much larger capacity of a crucible.” This way she can cast larger work. “All of it,” she said, “is quite tool-intensive.”
Both of her grandmothers were career artists, as well as her mother. “So I was very much born into an artist family.”
She has childhood memories of her grandmother taking her to a dock where she’d be taught sketching lessons on the dinghies that lingered out in the water; learning that she had to work quickly, get the perspective, and make choices.
When she wasn’t spending time with sketching lessons, her other grandmother – a pastel artist – was teaching her to use the complimentary form of an object’s color for its shadow. “Building color composition and the way an eye would read a piece; I really did grow up with a lot of family art lessons,” Hanson said.
And she’s carried that over into her own career, projecting her own life’s work in the most beautiful fashion with prints and metal castings.
Caroline Hanson – mother, artist, entrepreneur, and a sweet soul filled with form and purpose.
