If artist Ginger Hanrahan had her way, everyone would get down on their hands and knees and look at the earth.

At first glance, "How I Remembered It," by Hanrahan, a Bethel resident and student in WestConn's Master of Fine Arts program, is a cheerful canvas, a colorful, abstract with an owl and less discernible shapes that look like flowers. And though it seems like a happy explosion of color, the painting is a contradiction.

It is about the environment and the owl she calls her "kindred spirit" might be her. The flowers are actually fungi, mushrooms in various stages of growth, growing amidst the colorful swirls of paint she said is garbage. To absorb the scene in nature you really would have to "get down on all fours" and inspect closely.

"The woods are our last frontier," said Hanrahan, a MFA student at WestConn who described the 18-inch-by-16-inch painting, among five of hers exhibited in a student showcase at the university last week. The painting itself is a visual journey of her past.

She loved being out in nature, growing up in a densely forested area on an 85-acre farm in Bucks County, Pa.

"We were outdoors all the time. We had no TV. I spent most of my time under a toadstool climbing trees, building forts," she said. Her love of nature was nurtured by her parents.

Hanrahan, who does not reveal her age, is mother of two children. A son, 30, is also a graduate art student but at a different college and she has a daughter, 11. Her husband Jim Hanrahan, is a corporate writer.

She characterizes herself as an "observer" of what's going on in the environment and in society. The interests are reflected in her painting.

Today, she is a full-time student pursuing a career in art after 15 years working in non-profit administration. She received her undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she was nominated for a Fulbright fellowship. She spent six months doing fieldwork in Wales as an undergraduate and did a post-graduate teaching fellowship at UC Santa Cruz. She also studied at Yale and earned a master's in public health.

A lifelong textiles artist, she knits, weaves and felts, and time spent in Wales involved working with women who were artisans and struggling to make a living through textiles.

Hanrahan was in her 30s when she returned east from California and settled in Connecticut. Her focus was on maternal and child health and for the next 15 years she was a "start-up" person for an AIDS program, Alpha House in Bridgeport and Four Corners in New Haven, both programs for women and children that are homeless, among other non-profit initiatives.

She will graduate May 21 and plans to continue exhibiting her paintings, as well as start a collective of emerging female artists.

Turning the conversation to her painting, in a WestConn gallery last week where the works of first and second-year MFA students were exhibited in the Thesis Exhibition, she talked about what motivates her to use the painting media to explore the "community and the environment." She is eager to elaborate on the subjects with those interested in her paintings and uses bright, happy colors to draw attention, she said."I love color. If they're (the paintings) are pretty they (viewers) will want to look closely at them and talk to me," she said.

"There's garbage in our midsts and that's embedded in the work," she continued, pointing out that mixed in an area of pink shapes she said are mushrooms, in one part of her painting, are swirled strokes of acrylic that seem layered on the canvas and meant to represent "discarded pieces of trash.

One of the five works she displayed in the showcase called, "Too Early," was inspired, she said, by the ground in early spring soon "after the snow has melted."

Prior to the showcase that ended Monday, the WestConn MFA students showed their paintings at Hunter College in New York in a collective show that drew talent from colleges in the tri-state area, including Yale. It was an "honor" to be part of the group, Hanrahan said.

Hanrahan completed a residency at an art program last summer in Vermont and spent the time in the woods examining the environment the way she did as a girl.

With sketch pad and pencil, she drew what she saw. In order to recreate the memories she had to get down on her hands and knees to observe the layout of the forest floor, she said.

"The garbage becomes integrated with nature," she said, giving the example of a beer bottle with moss growing on it she once found and put in a painting.

She hikes regularly in the Poconos and in Huntington and Putnam Memorial parks near her home in Bethel. The fieldwork is part of the panting process, she said and described it.

A cluster of young rosettes for example, or mature tougher specimens, may all be mushrooms, but "scratch the surface" literally and you'll find more to put in a picture.

"When you look closely at moss growing on objects in the woods then take a stick and scratch at it sometimes you will see old bottle or some other garbage someone threw on the ground. It fascinates me how discarded trash has integrated with nature. If more people got down on all fours what would they see? We're like in little bubbles driving around in our cars. There are "secrets" out in the wood."

The "unnoticed" hidden details on the earth also serves as a metaphor in Hanrahan's paintings in how she thinks people in society interact with one another.

"What else," she wonders, "don't people notice? Each other? The scarves and hats some grandmother lovingly made? The homeless? Do we notice them anymore? I'll be on the train to Manhattan and watching a woman make a baby blanket and I think it someone's going to use it then put it away in a closet. I think, the pour soul is thinking while she's making it, I love my grandson."

Her focus now that she's about to graduate is on selling her artwork and making a living. To that end she is building a new Web site and exhibiting the paintings.

She is a finalist in a juried show Art of the Northeast May 1 through June 8 at Silvermine Guild of Arts Center in New Canaan. It draws about 1,200 entries from artists throughout New England, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

The juror, Valerie Smith, director of exhibitions and senior curator of the Queens Museum of Art will lead a gallery "Walk and Talk" exhibition tour on Friday, May 4 at 6 p.m., prior to the public reception from 7 to 9 p.m.

Additionally, to demonstrate her kinship for fellow women artists, she is assembling 10 women artists for a September show at Brickhouse Collection, a New-Milford store that carries unusual hand-crafted items from India made almost exclusively by women artisans. A portion of the proceeds from the art sale Hanrahan will organize will go to charity.

 

From June 19 to July 7 the students in the MFA program at WestConn will exhibit at Blue Mountain Gallery (530 W. 25th Street, fourth floor, New York). There will be an opening reception June 21 from 5 to 8 p.m. and the public is invited to meet the artists. For information, call the gallery at (646) 486-4730. To see the paintings by Ginger Hanrahan go to http://wcsu.edu/artalumni/mfastudents/hanrahang.html