Hannah Jensen Art: Paint carving technique

Hannah Jensen's art is unlike traditional painting because she works in reverse. She applies between 40 and 80 layers of Resene Lumbersider acrylic house paint to a ply board before carving into by hand with a simple Speedball linoleum cutter to reveal various colours and create detailed images filled with depth, texture and shadow. 

A graduate of the Auckland University of Technology, where she studied intaglio, screenprinting, lithography, etching, and research into Japanese woodblocks, her current technique stems from a happy accident in 2003. 

In love with the Scandinavian aesthetic, Hannah began experimenting with a large tin of white house paint and coated a wooden board with 23 layers.

Initially planning  to carve through the paint into the wood, she instead carved a design of gannets directly into the paint instead. 

“At first, I was annoyed at how thick it was, but within seconds, the light bulb went off, and I knew I could carve into the paint,” she says.

“My first paint carvings were shallow into the white paint for highlights, and then deeper into the wood for shadows. They were quite amazing.” 

Hannah begins with an idea, then searches for the right image or photograph before choosing her colour palette.

Adding one to three layers a day, the layering process takes approximately four to five weeks. Once the paint is dry, she sketches the design.

The intricate carving alone, where she asserts varied pressures to reach different layers, can take up to eight weeks. Finally, she paints subtle washes back into the work to add depth before spraying it with a matt varnish.

As a lover of the great outdoors and an avid hiker, biker, and surfer, Hannah finds inspiration in nature. “Any plant, tree, flower, ocean life, spring growth or the change of a season is magical,” she explains.

Her artworks have featured leopards, silverback gorillas, polar bears, hares, wild horses, Japanese cranes, elephants and peacocks. 

Time spent with the animals at her father’s South African game park, where he lived for the last 16 years of his life, was hugely inspirational. “The wild animals stole my heart,” she discloses.

“I would spend hours walking around my dad’s game reserve, watching the animals: warthogs, kudus, impalas, giraffes, wildebeests, baboons, hippos, and more.” 

With her art, Hannah aims to convey her passion for wildlife and create a connection between them and her audiences, encouraging them to consider the plight of endangered species in our contemporary world.

“I believe art is a wonderful visual language that can communicate ideas and subjects we don’t often talk about. I want my art to share the stories of animals, to be a voice for them.” 

She presented 11 life-size wildlife works - each representing a member of her family - in her 2012 solo exhibition, Heraldik, at Saatchi & Saatchi Gallery, Auckland.

To complete her eight large-scale works for her upcoming exhibition, Wild, it took her five years and 140 litres of paint. “A good idea hangs around until it’s time to create it,” she points out.

Hannah was born in Bath, England, in 1984, and moved to New Zealand, where her mother is from, when she was just 22 months old.

She has spent most of her life in Auckland. Watching her mother work with clay as a potter on the kitchen table as a child, she has wanted to be an artist ever since she could speak. 

“I remember wanting to be an artist when I was around the age of four," she recalls. "I knew it meant I could create things. To me, that sounded magical.”

Hannah has been inundated with requests after a video of her creative process went viral on Instagram.

In the past three years, she has completed 200 commissions, bringing people’s dreams to life through her art. She is currently on  break from commissioned work to focus on personal projects. 

Her next two carvings are comparatively huge. One features a rhino carved with blue and white Chinese porcelain patterns, bringing to mind the black market rhino horn trade in China.

The other, a whale covered in flowers as a homage to our dying oceans, is also heart-wrenching. Each is over 3m long, making them her largest pieces to date. She will use 62 litres of paint to create them.

Despite the sad stories in two of her works, she says most of it aims to bring joy. "I hope they inspire viewers to make more sustainable, healthier choices in their daily lives." 

Today, Hannah works alone out of a converted garage in her home and says,  “I adore making, using my hands to create images that come to me from a soul level; I feel them, then I see them, develop them in my mind, and then bring them to life in layers of paint using my technique."

"The moment I finish an idea I've been mulling over for years is magical for me. It makes me happy to be able to create a body of work for people to interact with and be moved by.”

Artwork images courtesy of Hannah Jensen.