If we stepped back in time thirty-two years, we’d find a young, pre-teen Erin Hanson venturing across the street from her school in La Cañada Flintridge, nervously holding all her best works of art in a small portfolio, about to ask for a job at a mural studio.

The mural company across the street created large-scale acrylic paintings on a commission basis and was owned by Mr. Paytan. That afternoon, I was hired at Paytan Place (though for years I thought it was “Paintin’ Place”) at the esteemed rate of $8/hour and was promptly set to work cleaning brushes.

It was weeks before I was allowed to take one of those brushes in hand and apply it, paint laden, to a canvas.

The first thing Mr. Paytan taught me was how to apply three layers of acrylic paint to create consistent-looking trees across some rolling hills. 

He handed me a brush, chosen out of a few hundred others in buckets on the ground. The bristles were worn down, spiking out in all directions, and (I thought) ripe for the trash can. 

“Perfect brush,” said Paytan. 

He proceeded to dabble on a tree shape using dark green paint. The spiky brush made perfect leafy-branch shapes with each press, like using a tree-branch-shaped sponge stamp. The acrylic paint set quickly while he rinsed and dried the brush, and then he showed me how to apply a lighter shade of green on just the left sides of the dark leaf blobs and sporadically through the middle of the trees. Finally, a light-yellow-green appeared in leafy shapes on the left side of each mid-tone green. The final effect was a completely three-dimensional tree that took about two minutes to paint. 

Ten minutes later, I was sitting fifteen feet off the ground on a paint-splattered scaffold, painting little matching trees across a vast landscape painting.

When painting murals with other artists, the goal is to have everyone’s painting style consistent, so it looks like the same person painted the entire canvas. There were nine of us artists, and I was by far the youngest. 

The mural studio was in a huge warehouse behind an auditorium, with stretcher bars suspended from high ceilings. Across the floor were hundreds of acrylic paint cans lying on canvas drop cloths. Metal scaffolding, two stories tall, hung about in various states of assembly. A half dozen adult artists stood or sat around the large room, with loud music blaring from the paint-speckled speakers.

Erin Hanson (age 13) in the mural studio, second from the bottom left.

These were the days before digital printing and wide-format, roll-to-roll canvas and vinyl prints. Thirty years ago, if you wanted a large piece of art for your casino, cruise ship, or restaurant, you called up a mural company and they painted it for you. The paintings I worked on during my mural career were displayed all over the world, but mainly seemed to end up in Las Vegas, including the Stratosphere, which was being built at the time. We painted dogs playing cards, an entire circus-themed series, and I’m pretty sure I helped paint the fluffy clouds that adorn the ceilings of the Venetian.

I loved the grand impact of a colossal painting. My favorite piece we made was a 30-foot-tall painting of a herd of stampeding buffalo running straight at the viewer. The immense size of the artwork made me feel completely immersed in the scene, imagining the beast’s rolling eyes and hot, foaming breath.

While working at Paytan Place, I saw the grimier side of being an artist as well. I watched as Mr. Paytan had to destroy and re-paint 300 feet of canvas because of a miscommunication in the commission agreement. And while there were times that business boomed and everyone worked 18-hour days, at other times, only one or two artists remained employed, and I was told, “We will call you if we need you.”

This is probably why I was separately advised by each of these grown-up artists not to pursue a career in art. “You are smart and hardworking. You can get a much better career than this,” they said. 

And so, after working at Paytan Place for three years, I adopted a new path that brought me to pre-medical at UC Berkeley, eventually obtaining a bioengineering degree in 2003. 

Painting Through PreMed

I never put down my brush while in college, however. I have always been enamored with Japanese brush art, and I created many brush paintings of lanky pine trees and fog-shrouded mountains. I took watercolors to another level, and I started emulating Jim Lee’s comic artwork from his Batman graphic novels. Similar to Japanese paintings, graphic novel art had strong, sure lines in black ink that separated the planes of color. Less was more – a single brush stroke could have enough emotional impact to carry the whole composition.

Making a Living as an Artist

I’ve told this story before, but it wasn’t until years after graduating from college that I took up oil paints again and decided to start creating one painting a week. The location was Red Rock Canyon, the inspiration was rock climbing, the color was the warm morning light of the golden hour, and the medium was oil paints—highly textured and deeply pigmented, the perfect method to capture the rocks I was climbing.

Now that I’m all grown up and did find a way to make a living as an artist, I’ve come full circle back to creating mural-sized paintings, but this time with oil paint.

The theme for my big collection release this year is Colossal-Sized Works. I want to create the same emotional impact with these large oil paintings that the oversized acrylic murals did when I was a teenager. I want the viewer to feel like they can step right into a different world when they stand in front of my painting. 

The biggest challenge working in my Open Impressionist technique on a grand scale (which means not overlapping my brushstrokes and getting each stroke right the first time) is planning out the composition in enough detail so I can paint the piece from two feet away and know it is creating the effect I want from ten feet away. I have experimented with many ways of pre-planning large works, from inventive underpaintings to covering three rolling palettes with every color that will appear in the painting before I pick up a brush.

Nothing beats just good ol' experience when painting large-scale works, however. Each piece I complete lets me figure out a better way of tackling color, light, and composition on a canvas larger than I am. 

A few months ago, I measured the walls in my gallery and worked out the largest paintings I could hang in there. I am about a third of the way through painting The Colossal Collection. You, of course, are invited to the artists' reception, which will take place this summer at my gallery in Oregon wine country.

And now, back to the canvas.

Erin Hanson, standing on a rolling cart to paint Lilies Dreaming, a Colossal Collection painting measuring 96 x 56 inches.