Frank Hanavan – “The Sidewalk is the Studio”

November 14, 2021 – January 2, 2022

Frank Hanavan’s last exhibition in the Hoboken Museum’s Upper Gallery showcased his temporary departure from painting with acrylics into working with watercolors. The resulting series of watercolors were beautiful, but he has since returned to painting with acrylics – always en plein air, French for painting on site in front of the subject – for his latest exhibit, The Sidewalk Is the Studio, which opens Sunday, Nov. 14, with a free opening reception from 2 – 5 pm. The exhibit will be on view until Jan 2, 2022.

Hanavan says that even his brief foray into painting with watercolor was transformative. His style in acrylics has changed – he’s painting many of the same subjects, sidewalk scenes in Hoboken – and his canvases are still recognizably Frank Hanavans, but his brush strokes are looser and more experimental.

“Working in acrylics, I found my technique was getting tighter and tighter,” he says. “But working with the watercolors helped loosen me up.”

What he means by tight, he says, is that for every brush stroke he would usually make, he would go back and dab a couple more strokes around it to refine and blend each stroke to achieve the realistic impression he was going for. He says the resulting paintings were more precise renditions of the scenes he was depicting, but they could be stiffer, with less implied motion than in real life.

Now, he says, “Each brush mark has its own personality, they’re more “messy” or gestural, and each brush stroke has to do more of the work.”

“I feel better while painting — more in the moment. Each painting goes more quickly, and I have to paint with more confidence and awareness, instead of second-guessing and third-guessing each stroke.” Even though he calls his new style “messy,” he likes the new paintings, and he’s finding people are responding well to his new style.

“Working this way makes conversations with passersby more disruptive,” he says, as he has to focus more. “It’s sort of like a juggling act, keeping all the balls in the air at once, for a couple hours a day.” While he misses the frequent conversations with random strangers, he is now waking up for each day of painting with a renewed sense of enthusiasm, he couldn’t wait to get back to work.

Hanavan has been a fixture on Hoboken’s sidewalks for over two decades now, but he has been painting more New York City and Jersey City scenes over the past few years. This summer, in preparation for the exhibition at the Hoboken Museum, he spent more time in Hoboken, and kept seeing people he hadn’t seen in years, from former Mayor Dave Roberts to his former landlord and people he knew from his favorite Hoboken drinking hole.

Most of the 16 – 17 paintings in the exhibit are of Washington Street, which was purely coincidental to the current Main Gallery exhibit, “The Avenue.” He was particularly taken with the sidewalk café umbrellas as a subject. A few paintings are of night scenes, which, in contrast to the plein air paintings, were painted in his home studio from photographs.

For one painting, he returned to a classic image of his: A Mr. Softee truck. The new painting features the Empire State Building in the background and Hoboken in the foreground.

When he’s not painting, Hanavan indulges his fascination with all things nautical. He has served as a volunteer at the South Street Seaport Museum working on restoring old sailing ships, and has become an expert in nautical knots. Lately, he’s been creating hand-sewn canvas bags with nautical themes, sewed with old sail cloth in the time-honored techniques that were used to stitch sturdy sails in the olden days, which he learned about from a book. For more of his work, visit his website at www.frankhanavan.com.

The exhibit is supported by a block grant from the State/County Partnership program for the Arts, administered by the Hudson County Division of Cultural and Heritage Affairs.