Hanna’s story starts in the farmlands of southern Ontario, Canada with long stretches of open land, changing light, and the kind of quiet that makes a kid pay attention to the world around her. It’s probably no accident that Grant Wood’s landscapes, with their illustrative realism and careful use of light, would later speak to her so strongly.
In high school, that pull toward art found its first real focus: pencil work, and her earliest pointillist pieces, built in ink. She loved the control of it — the way thousands of small, deliberate marks could coalesce into something with real texture and character, letting randomness resolve itself into structure. It’s a technique she’s carried with her ever since.
Her formal art education began at South Florida Community College, where she studied Fine Art on a scholarship. It was here her world was first opened up to mediums beyond pencil and ink, exploring the tools that would eventually become her artistic voice.
Years later, after getting married and welcoming her oldest, Eoin (affectionately known as Goober), Hanna spent a season as a stay-at-home mom — and it was during this time that she began working toward her degree in Art History at Arizona State University. When Eoin started kindergarten, she returned to school to pursue teaching as well, finishing her ASU degree just as her teaching career began. Today, she teaches middle grades art — bringing the same patience and curiosity to her students that she brings to her own canvas.
Across both schools, Hanna found the artists who’d shape how she sees a canvas: Georges Seurat, for the discipline and payoff of pointillism; Alex Peintre, for the idea that a painting can start with a random object or texture and let the piece tell you where it wants to go; Keith Haring, for proof that simplicity and playfulness can carry real life and energy; and Grant Wood, whose landscapes still echo that Ontario farmland she grew up in.
The years that followed took her across the map — from Florida, to North Carolina, to Montana — before she and her family settled permanently in Florida.
Not long after, her youngest, Ollie, arrived — and with him, an all-consuming love of sharks that would change the direction of Hanna’s work. Watching Ollie’s fascination with the ocean, something shifted in her own art. Not long after, reading Sarah Penner’s The Amalfi Curse and its vivid descriptions of the Amalfi Coast pushed her fully into an oceanic era — the vibrant blues, depth, and light of water becoming a central subject in her paintings.
Alongside the ocean work, flowers have always been a quiet source of peace for Hanna — a subject she returns to again and again. That appreciation became something more formal when her artwork was featured in David the Good’s book, Create Your Own Florida Food Forest. She’s also lent her artistic eye closer to home, illustrating her husband Hoss’s Materia Medica as he pursues his path toward becoming a Clinical Herbalist and Aromatherapist.
Hanna has since created two coloring books — an educational shark coloring book made for Ollie, and a book of flowers made for herself — with more in the works: one for Goober, one for Hoss, and one designed specifically for art education in Pre-K and Kindergarten classrooms.
Whether she’s painting an ocean, a bloom, or a world only she can see yet, Hanna’s work is built the same way it always has been: one deliberate mark at a time.
