Lori Claire Hanson Tom

​2019
Lori- Claire Hanson Tom is a California landscape painter who’s plein-air interpretations of the Sierra Nevada mountains and foothills evoke a sense of magic realism. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute and served an apprenticeship under celebrated artist Gregory Gillespie. In 2015 she worked on a graphic novel production with Jules Feiffer at South Hampton College in New York. And illustrated the Bubblegum Princess, written by Julie Gribble (KidLit TV), published by New York Media Works, 2013.
 Currently Lori loves to teach painting, drawing and nature journaling at Columbia College in the gold country, where she lives in an oak grove with her husband Jon and their dog and kitty. Her work is shown and collected in California and around the United States.

Process:
The Nature that exists in the mountains, in the woods and in the arrangement of junk in the messiest drawer in your house, is full of chaotic beauty. I am compelled to create a visual order with painting and drawing mediums through a process of synthesis and disruption.
When I am engaged in painting/drawing there is a conversation of activity between myself, the medium and the subject.  I uncover the images, as if they have always been there waiting for me to find them. I am deployed to movement within a static frame.
In this process of excavation, color, brush stroke, texture and shape(s) appear in a theatre of visual movement upon the surface. I proceed to excavate my way through the compositions of these elements, disrupting the painting with an intent to synthesize the image into a finish. Meaning and narrative evolve through recognition and relationships of these elements within the rest of the composition.

The painting and drawing give me a membranous material through which I can work to discover these sensations within the two-dimensional surface.

​It is the bridge between the Abstract and Magic Realism that I create.