In all transparency, my plan for this week’s Deep End was to interview a friend’s boyfriend about his clothing brand. Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to be interviewed because he was in the ER with his friend who broke their foot. Lucky for me, my talented friend Hanna Burch, an undeclared first year student, swooped in to save me and graciously said yes to answering some questions about her art last minute.
Hanna’s art is currently inspired a lot by whimsicality and childhood. Since coming to New Paltz, she’s been reflecting on being a kid and how much things have changed since she left for school. “I’ve been thinking about being away from my family and my childhood space.” Her pieces are inspired by things that remind her of childhood nostalgia.
“I’ve been really loving the idea of Star People,” she told me and showed me a lively drawing of a blue person who had a galaxy drawn into their hair. “Star People,” Hanna said, “are not real people. They’re just people who are just different. They’re people from the stars.”
Hanna laughed as she indulged me in another inspiration behind her art and said, “I also really like mold.” She explained it was the idea of decay she was attracted to, because her art has a “deconstructed” style to it, in which she combines a bunch of blank lines and shapes into an image. “I love the idea of mold because it’s living off the decay of other things. It also looks really cool. It’s kind of fun to play around with different colors and draw variations on the concept of decay because that can apply to so many things, like to your life.”
For more on Hanna and her work, visit @hanna_burch on Instagram.
