There are painters who chase light, and there are painters who translate it. Erin Hanson belongs to the latter. In Mosaic Path, the familiar scene of a sunlit road beneath autumn trees becomes a visual symphony, not of realism, but of sensation. The canvas hums. Each stroke is a tessera in a larger mosaic of warmth and motion, as if the world were composed not of matter but of wavelengths. The path itself, rendered in blues and violets, is not shadow in the literal sense but the cool counterpoint to the golden blaze of the canopy above. The light doesn’t fall on the road; it shatters across it, refracted into a thousand facets.
Claude Monet once said, “Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.” In Hanson’s hands, color becomes that same consuming vocabulary. It becomes a language that speaks directly to the senses before the intellect can intervene. Her strokes are confident, sculptural, deliberate. She lays down color as if she were assembling a cathedral of light, every hue a pane of glass. The result is both intimate and monumental: an autumn afternoon reimagined as stained glass for the soul.
Impressionism itself began as rebellion: a defiance of academic boundaries and an embrace of transience. Its early practitioners sought not the thing seen but the way of seeing it. When Monet painted his Impression, Sunrise, he wasn’t recording a harbor; he was capturing the sensation of dawn, the vibration between eye and world. Renoir once said, “For me, a picture must be a pleasant thing, joyful and pretty — yes, pretty. There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is.” Hanson’s work carries that same insistence on joy, though hers is tempered with the quiet melancholy of passing time.
Her self-described “Open Impressionism” extends that legacy. While the early Impressionists dissolved form into vapor and light, Hanson builds it back up again through texture and openness. She leaves intentional spaces between strokes, allowing the underlying canvas to breathe, an act that both modernizes and spiritualizes the movement. Light, in her work, isn’t trapped by pigment; it travels through it. There’s an almost alchemical quality in this, as if she’s discovered how to keep the painting alive long after the brush is set down.
Cézanne, reflecting on his own evolution beyond Impressionism, once said, “A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.” Hanson’s landscapes pulse with emotion not because of sentimentality but because of perception’s sincerity. Her colors are experiential. They express the act of being alive in color. The golds and oranges in Mosaic Path blaze not only with sunlight but with the warmth of memory. A memory of those late-afternoon hours when the world seems to lean toward its own ending.
Autumn has always been my favorite season, and perhaps that is why this palette speaks to me so intimately. The world in decline burns brightest. The amber leaves against indigo shadow, the sharpness of cool air, the way even decay smells sweet. Hanson captures that paradox. The paradox of how beauty’s truth lies in impermanence. The road winding beneath her tree becomes a metaphor for time itself: we move forward through radiance and loss, step by step, illuminated by both.
Kandinsky, writing in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, observed that “Color is a power which directly influences the soul.” That principle lives fully in Mosaic Path. The painting bypasses language and lands directly in the body. The oranges lift the heart; the violets draw it inward. The interplay of complementary tones becomes a psychological map: joy and reflection, presence and longing, in perfect dialogue. Hanson’s light is not external illumination but internal resonance, a meeting of perception and emotion that feels almost sacred.
In that sense, Hanson’s “open” approach is not just stylistic but philosophical. It invites participation. The gaps between her strokes are spaces for the viewer’s own perception to enter, to complete the experience. When I look at her work, I don’t merely see the landscape; I inhabit it. I walk her mosaic road, feeling the color shift beneath my own attention. I realize that light itself is never still. That light in art is both what we perceive and what perceives us.
In the end, Mosaic Path stands as a meditation on gratitude. It teaches, as Monet and Cézanne before her taught, that art is not about the world rendered faithfully but the world felt faithfully. Each patch of color is a prayer to the fleeting moment. Each stroke, a record of attention. Hanson reminds us that illumination is not something found outside ourselves, but something made, stroke by stroke, by the act of truly looking.