Transforming loss into art
March 30, 2023
The figures in Hannah Yanetsko’s paintings may be adrift, but this young artist is firmly grounded.
by Page Leggett
You wouldn’t expect anything made using coffee grounds and roofing tar to yield something refined and beautiful. Then again, you wouldn’t expect a 24-year-old artist using those oddball ingredients to be as accomplished and eloquent as Hannah Yanetsko.
The Mooresville-raised contemporary artist, who now lives in Davidson with her husband and two young daughters, has a specific subject matter: oceans overpopulated with people. But these aren’t carefree vacationers enjoying the sun and surf. Yanetsko’s characters seem disconnected from one another. There’s a mysterious, melancholy feeling to her art. It’s no wonder people relate to it. She says of the connection between painting and viewer: “We’re all wading in some sense … through grief, disappointment and uncertainty.”
Left: A Never Ending Story, 36 x 48; Right: Artist Hannah Yanetsko
Art as autobiography
Yanetsko understands grief. She began practicing art at age 11, shortly after her father’s death. Painting has helped her cope with the loss. “Painting is like me telling my life story,” she says. “It became a way for me to grieve in a way that felt private, and it’s been [something] I’ve returned to through different seasons of life.”
She was lucky to find early mentors. “A man at our church, Chris Underwood, was an incredible painter,” she says. “I’d sit in the lobby during services and gawk at his paintings on the wall and try to figure out how in the world he made that mark, how he built those layers. He became a mentor to me. I’d babysit his children, and he’d give me art supplies in exchange.” Her art teacher at Cannon School in Concord, Nathaniel Rogers, also helped her develop as an artist.
As a girl, Yanetsko wanted to become an artist, but it didn’t seem like a realistic dream. She assumed she’d go to college, then grad school and get what she calls “a quote-unquote, ‘respectable’ job.”
“It was a dream I allowed the culture of expectation to convince me I’d outgrow,” she says.
After starting at the University of Georgia as a pre-med major and then spending a semester in Italy, where she rediscovered her love of art, she realized she wasn’t on a path that felt authentic. She left school, returned home, continued painting, fell in love and got married in August 2019.
At the onset of the pandemic, her husband lost his job. “We were newlyweds, expecting our first baby in July 2020 and wondering how we could make money,” she says. “We were alone in the hospital for the birth; we couldn’t have family visit. It was extremely difficult.”
But the forced aloneness turned out to have a purpose. “In the solitude of the pandemic, trapped inside our tiny, little apartment, I started painting,” she says. “I posted a painting on Instagram. And someone reached out to ask if it was available and bought it.”
Suddenly, she realized she could make money doing what she loved. She had modest hopes — maybe she could sell one painting a month on Instagram? “I was feeling some traction, and the dream started coming back to life,” she says.
She contacted a handful of galleries, and within a few days, she’d heard back from Art & Light Gallery in Greenville, S.C. “I literally had no idea what I was doing, but I delivered my first body of work in April 2021, and it’s been nonstop since then.”
The gallery will host Yanetsko’s first solo show, The Space Between Love and Mystery, from April 4 – July 15 at Greenville’s James Beard Award-nominated restaurant, The Anchorage. Selections of her work can also be viewed at Art & Light’s main gallery.
Left: The Test of Time, 30 x 30; Right: The Quiet Knowing, 24 x 48
The unlikely beauty of scars
Yanetsko paints daily in her home studio in Davidson. “My studio is beautiful, bright and full of windows,” she says. “It’s connected to our house, so the door’s always open. There are always paint footprints going in and out.” Those footprints belong to Adeline, who’s 3. Eleanor, 12 months, is too young to be interested in Mom’s work.
Her process begins with drawing her figures in pencil. She uses a palette of about five colors and builds in light, shadow and mid-tones. Next, she paints the background, then coats it in melted beeswax.
The third phase is “a holdover from childhood” when her explorations took her through the trash (where she found coffee grounds) and the garage (where she stumbled on her dad’s roofing tar). The concoction of coffee grounds, tar, paint and oil forms a gritty mixture she uses over the wax to “stain and exfoliate it,” she says. “I make circular motions all over the surface, which creates a scarring effect and a beautiful texture. The tar stains it; that’s how I achieve the depth in my work.”
In the next phase, she uses pen and pencil to “rough up the wax a little more, creating more texture.” The penultimate phase involves pouring epoxy resin over the surface. “When you put that high-gloss epoxy over it, it comes to life in a new way,” she says. “It looks refined, luxurious and elegant.”
Yanetsko says she has little control over how the coffee grounds/tar mixture will take to the surface and loves seeing what emerges. Just as her subject matter is mysterious, so is the process that yields the finished product. The final touch: She encases her paintings in a natural-finish, maple shadowbox frame.
Then she sends them out into the world, where viewers bring their own perspectives to the work.
“My work is less about these figures — they’re sort of abstracted — and more about the perspective. You’re seeing these figures from an aerial view,” she says.
“There’s a quote that’s helped me navigate life, and it’s: ‘If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.’ Everything in life is about perspective. Having grief and trauma at different times in my life — but especially at such a young age — changed everything for me. Perspective doesn’t change what exists, but it changes how we engage with it.” SP
Love & mystery: Learn more about Hannah Yanetsko at her website, hsya.studio, or follow her on Instagram at @hysa.studio. See the work on view at Art & Light Gallery in Greenville, S.C., at artandlightgallery.com.
photographs courtesy Art & Light Gallery
