Chris Hanna

 Last year when I was visiting Mexico City I took the train down to one of my favorite places: San Angel. It used to be a rural farming town near the capital, but as Mexico City grew it absorbed many of these places. One of the things I love though is that it kept a lot of its historic character like the cobblestone streets, plazas, and churches. This time there was a new place on my itinerary, the former convent of the Discalced Carmelites. (Discalced means without shoes and the Carmelites are a mendicant order that traces back to Mt. Carmel in Israel.) It was founded in 1615 and became a museum in 1929. After Mexican independence from Spain, many monasteries became state property or lost state funding. This followed the separation of church and state in the new country.     From the street I could see the colorful domes of the sanctuary. Each was made with tiles of a different color and ornamented with caring detail. I decided to paint them live as people poured out of ...

If you had asked me a couple years ago whether the modern art movement ruined art or not, I would've said yes. I've read many articles and watched many videos saying in the last 100 years we've seen the downfall of beauty thanks to things like brutalism. And then SUDDENLY, my mind changed. I started to become more curious about modern art movements thanks to music like vaporwave. It's a genre that has this retro-futurism feel to it. I remember two years ago I started going to the mall with my pseudo-retro music on to appreciate the skylights and shiny floors. So when I passed by this unassuming office building I pulled over and got out my camera. I loved the dramatic shadows that the geometric shapes were making on this cloudy day. This was part of a square cutout in the building, centered around this staircase. You can walk underneath the second floor and sit on benches. To me the great thing about art is highlighting the beauty in ordinary things like this. These kind...

Click here to purchase - $142 - 7" x 6.5" - Gouache on Paper On a rainy day in January, I walked around these hills hugging the Tokyo Bay. Cold, wet, and a little lost I took out my camera to save this scene. The landscape faded into an endless fog. The nearly frozen rain continued its gentle patter. The mist reached through the trees and the valleys. I had to pause.

San Antonio has a few art museums and each serves up a different type of art: old, modern, conceptual. Of them my favorite has to be the McNay! Last week me and my girlfriend went there; I was shocked it was her first visit. I told her it was very scenic so she should prepare for photos.     I love that they have a water lily painting by Monet here. When I first saw it up I almost cried and I sat in the room, appreciating the painting. Monet was one of the first artists I liked when I got curious about art in middle school. Me and my grandma even went to a Monet exhibit to see a lifetime of his work.     To me, the McNay building and grounds is a museum itself. It's a Spanish colonial style mansion on a hill, surrounded by verdant gardens and fields. When Marion Koogler McNay died in 1950, she donated her house and art collection to create this museum.  

If you've ever been to a secondhand store, you might recognize decor and art with a look you can't just quite pin down. There's geometric shapes, fancy-looking materials, and it looks so...refined somehow. https://www.are.na/block/4496275 It's called Frasurbane. I didn't know what to call this until one day I stumbled on the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute. I'm not sure who runs it but someone out there is looking for all these old mass-market aesthetics and naming them. Thanks to that, all kind of collections on the internet have popped up using these new names. I love to see these kinds of movements, driven by curiosity and exploring the past. https://www.are.na/block/4496255 Personally, I like the eclectic look of it all. Surrealism, classical design, later art movements, and luxury all grouped into one. It just feels like I'm in a bankers office, a 90s music video, or holding a box of old software. So here's a painting I did, based on a magazi...

Small museums are the best!  Last weekend I went to the Texas Transportation Museum with my girlfriend Aamerah to take some pictures. I've loved trains since I was a kid and I thought photos in the train cars would make some nice pictures. Originally I started taking photos just to use as a reference, but now I like for them to stand on their own as art. I remember when I first asked her to model for me during our first summer together. She was confused and flattered at the same time, but over time we both grew. It quickly became something we put a lot of thought into to create a shared vision. The lighting in this passenger car was so good. It was really sunny outside and it took some fiddling with my point-and-shoot camera to get good shots. But all the windows gave us some chances to filter out the extra light.     Photography is interesting because I never really know how it'll turn out until I get my photos on the computer. That little screen on the camera doesn'...