Hannah Shook

Enamored with art from the time she could hold a crayon, Hannah attended children’s classes at Cranbrook Institute in her native Michigan. She graduated from the Center for Creative Studies College of Art and Design, in Detroit, and studied at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. Hannah has always sought to express the almost uncontainable vitality and beauty that she experiences in nature. Inspired as a teenager by the passionate work of Chaime Soutine, She also found kindred spirits in the abstract expressionists, and more recently, in contemporary native American painters and Australian painter Elisabeth Cummings. Through deep inner work, Hannah was profoundly empowered by her experience of encountering in the unconscious, the free flow of intuition and play. A gift from her years of teaching very young children was the beginners mind experience of pure, wholly uncontrived joyous expression. Painting has been the passionate center of Hannah’s existence. She has spent much time living, painting, and teaching art workshops in northern New Mexico, inspired by the beauty and power of the landscape, and delighting in the magic and energy, the soulfulness and color of the “land of enchantment” and its people. During these years Hannah painted and exhibited with her good friend the late Louisa McElwain while living in a sweet old adobe in Abiquiu Hannah’s work has been represented by Abend Gallery in Denver, and Manitou Gallery and Evoke Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe. She presently lives and paints extensively in the north central mountains of Colorado. Hannah lives at 9000 feet in the Rocky Mountains.