Painting is thinking – DIANE HANSON, 32, Award-winning artist

Diane Hanson always knew she wanted to be an artist. She’s been at it since she was a little girl and used to come in from recess to learn to draw.

As a first-grader, she won an art competition at her school in West Concord, Minn. This summer she won the Brunner Gallery award at Art Melt. She’s racked up some impressive awards between those two, including a Fulbright Grant, as well as a BFA in painting from Boston University and an MA and MFA in painting and printmaking from SMU.

Her study and her husband’s job have taken her all over the country, as well as to Europe. “I think every place and person and experience affect you somehow,” says the 32-year-old. Experience and memory run like intertwined threads through her work—farm equipment and crops, Italian Renaissance stonework tracery, bassoon reeds. It was the bassoon that brought her to Baton Rouge two and a half years ago, when her husband, bassoonist Gabriel Beavers, accepted an assistant professorship in the LSU School of Music.

In spite of her experience with such art meccas as Italy and Miami, Baton Rouge hasn’t been a letdown. Hanson and her husband love LSU, although she has yet to darken the gate of Tiger Stadium. They have met a lot of people through the university as well as the Baton Rouge Gallery, where her paintings are sold and where she serves on the board.

At the ArtCenter/South Florida in Miami, where Hanson was a juried artist from 2004 to 2006, her studio was open. “I had access to the public, they had access to me,” she says. “I got to talk about my work, but I’m more of a private painter, anyway.” Works in progress are stapled to the walls of Hanson’s small home studio; she often paints standing up, and she likes to be able to move back from her work. Also posted on the wall is a sort of “to do” list—titles of paintings she’s working on or has in mind. Sometimes the title comes first; sometimes the painting does.

For Hanson, thinking and painting are much the same thing. She often paints for nine or 10 hours a day. “Addiction,” she explains with a smile.

Click here to return to the cover story.