Hansen: the unsung heroine of Scottish art
There’s a brilliant half-hour documentary available on YouTube called The Lunch Party: Liz Lochhead Meets Three Women Artists. In this BBC Scotland-made programme, aired in 1984, Falkirk-born Lys Hansen declared: “I can only really paint what I feel passionate about and I feel passionate about people. And their interchange and their relationship.”
In the 40 years since, Hansen has not wavered from this manifesto. At 87, she continues to paint the human condition in all its microscopic messy glory.
From the intimate stuff of life in her own orbit; inner turmoil, birth, bodies, sex, gender ambiguity, death and family life, she widens out to the ongoing impact of war and geopolitics.
Hansen thinks big and paints big. Her ideas spill onto canvas, neon or wood – whatever is to hand. It forces you as a viewer to reflect. On everything.
A major new exhibition of Hansen’s work, Live It Paint It, was opened on Friday at Falkirk’s Callendar House by Dr Geraldine Prince, a former governor of Edinburgh College of Art and long-time admirer of Hansen’s work.
She said: “Lys’s persistence, tenacity, the seriousness of her commitment, and the outstanding body of work produced over a creative lifetime, justify a claim I’ll happily nail to the mast: Lys is Scotland’s most distinguished, most European, living artist.”
I tend to agree. Hansen’s paintings are not always easy on the eye. They take you to uncomfortable places. But for me, this is what art should do.
In 1984, Hansen had this to say about painting the female form: “I wanted to put my hands inside the torso and just open it up and find out what was inside. A number of paintings dealt with a splitting open and also a shedding of outer skin which I considered some kind of corset which was confining a whole lot of feelings and experience.”
Intimate, visceral and true as a die. Lys Hansen is the unsung heroine of Scottish art.
Live it, Paint It is at Callendar House until August 11. Admission free.
Last week, I wrote about the new Wyllieum in Greenock, a new free attraction which celebrates the art of George Wyllie, who lived and worked in Inverclyde. The opening exhibition at the Wyllieum, which is based at Ocean Terminal in Greenock, is devoted to Wyllie’s spires. To Wyllie, they represented a life-long search for equilibrium. These finely tuned, tripod-like figures all balance a stone, while harnessing air and equilibrium. The star of the show is his Happy Compass spire, made for his wife, Daphne.