About Me

Ladislav R. Hanka

Printmaker • Draftsman • Book artist

Who am I and how much shall I reveal to the casual visitor of my website? I suppose I’ll tell you what seems relevant to the artwork I am showing you—plus a little.

My name marks me. I was born in 1952 in an ethnic enclave of Cedar Rapids, Iowa—the son of recent exiles from the worker’s paradise of Stalinist Czechoslovakia. Nazi occupation was a terrible stress under which my parents grew into an unnatural and premature, pre-wounded adulthood. Having their Russian liberators betray them and turn into the next foreign occupiers was too much. They crossed over the deeply forested mountains of the southern border into Bavaria in 1949—a time when the Russians and their allies were trying to consolidate their new holdings in a very labile geopolitical environment.

Borderlands were insecure and filled with smugglers and cutthroats—you never knew who you might encounter. The last hold-out SS units were still battling it out with elite Russian troops in the hills. A long concatenation of unlikely events led my folks to the USA where I grew up bilingual and thus ambivalent about many things—seeing all too many sides to most matters. That tends to irritate those with an agenda to promote. Allegiances, beliefs, social norms, and unexamined assumptions fare poorly in the eyes of a child whose home life is not the norm. That child rarely grows out of such frequently reinforced skepticism.

I passed through several belief systems, trying on various churches, sects and academic disciplines for size and found them all worthwhile, but also to be discarded once outgrown.  I seem constitutionally incapable of growing comfortably old in a familiar and nurturing church or political party.  I must instead go back to rediscovering the wheel and all else for myself.  I  continue to apply the time-tested means of gaining empirical knowledge to all areas of life.  I observe. I meditate.  I come thereby to my own experience of the numinous in much the same way as all the prophets, scientists, artists and mystics who bring new things to their fellow man.  Of course most charismatic cult leaders, dictators and self-deluded nut-cases have a similar approach.  Discernment is the key -  not taking one’s self too seriously. 

As an artist I think and work graphically - in line and predominantly in black and white.  Drawing is to all other art as nudes are to clothed figures and as skeletal structure is to muscle and fur.  By observing well enough to draw something, one learns to identify weight-bearing structures, begins to understand the lines of force,  and discern the relationships among objects.  For me, it begins with field studies; going out into the cold and heat,  dealing with biting insects - sketchbook in hand, learning to draw the twists and turns characteristic of a cedar or the unique ways in which only a bur oak branches.  Catfish tails fork in ways which those of carp do not and the operculum of a trout functions very differently in pumping water through its gills than do the spiracles of a lamprey.  As these structures and their visual clues become second nature, I take this growing work into the studio and begin to invent plausible creatures who fit into compositions with symbolic content.

The content of this work I do is three-fold:  The simplest level is an honoring of the creatures with whom I share this earth - the fascination with evolution and adaptation and all the wondrous variety of life and geology that occur on this planet.   In this I share an aesthetic ancestry with a prodigious pantheon of great as well as anonymous artists -  from those of the neolith,  painting by torchlight in caves, to tribal artists and primitives of all stripes.  Rembrandt loved his collections of sea shells and taxidermy specimens and drew frequently from that rich source of images.  The list goes on and includes Václav (Wencl)  Hollar, William Blake, Morris Graves, my own mentor Ladislav Čepelák and ultimately most everybody who was ever a child daring to face creation with crayon in hand.

The secondary level of content stems from the ideas and cleverness that my little monkey brain can generate.  I do need to be interested in what I do and the human is a fidgety being,  needing to stay amused - with the attention span of a chipmonk on most days.  I need to address my fellow man with statements about the big questions and be a part of the discipline as well.  It drives me to making books, staying at the press long enough to make an edition, to framing the finished work, communicating this through essays, composing my foolish website,  putting on exhibitions and trying my hand at computer-mediated print media.  It gets me up and moving.

What is timely about my art and makes for good art-talk,  is, however,  the very thing that will soon make it dated and uninteresting.  If my art is to have a second life, beyond my cleverly traversing the polemics of my day, it will by attaining to timeless values.  That happens when we touch that third level of content - the mythic dimension.  Daring to depart from being merely contemporary; daring to be in awe of the simple and universal and even more;  daring to be seen in that vulnerable state;  one may hope to apprehend that which time doesn’t change; that which the prophets and sages obliquely address; that which Jung and Campbell approach by firelight in the night; that which informs Bach and Beethoven;  that which Galileo recanted but for which others have died; that for which  Rembrandt, DaVinci and Dürer are signposts; implied but never explicitly stated - because it is beyond words; and ultimately also beyond a picture.   This is work foreordained to coming up short of the ultimate mark, but it is also an attempt worthy of one’s lifeblood and limited days upon this earthwalk.  

My subject matter will tell you where I find evidence of the divine.   I love to fish and gather mushrooms.  I cannot get enough of ancient trees and the way their asymmetries and gravity bring me back to a place of profound stillness.  The very idea that trees alive today were seeded at the birth of the old kingdom of Egypt and are thus as old as the written word itself,  sets me free. I kneel at their roots and feel blessed.