JAY HANNAH1922 - 2010 Jay Hannah was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1922. As both an artist and a scientist, Hannah spent a lifetime exploring the perception of form, light and color. In his twenties during the 1940s, he was friends with Carmel Art Association painters August Gay and S.C. Yuan. They often worked side-by-side at their easels. Hannah was also a close associate of Selden Connor Gile (1877-1947), one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s “Society of Six” members who painted outdoors, socialized, and exhibited together in and around Oakland California during the 1910s and 1920s. This group of six painters chose a more avant-garde style than most of their peers, especially after being inspired by modern trends presented in the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Hannah’s studies with Gile surely influenced his own artistic path, occupied with experimentation, a wide-range of subjects and styles, and a passion for painting. Hannah formally studied at both the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the California School of Fine Art in 1944-1945. From there he attended Stanford University between 1945 and 1947, followed by studies at the Grande Chaumiere in Paris from 1954 through 1955. He lived and created art on both the East and West coasts, chiefly abstract-grid paintings, figurative studies, landscapes, and still lifes. Hannah exhibited in galleries and competitions in San Francisco, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, New York City, Connecticut, and London, among others.The quiet sensitivity, immaculate compositions, and rendering of three-dimensional form in all of Hannah's paintings recall the work of the French masters Pierre Chardin and Paul Cezanne. His study of color perception link him to the work of Claude Monet and the other French Impressionists.Beginning in the 1970s, Hannah focused on color perception and how color relationships change when the viewing distance is changed. For the final four decades of his life, he combined his unique theories of humans’ color perception with his artistic talent to create paintings of exceptional beauty. Hannah’s art has been extensively discussed in several publications. His work on color perception was the subject of a paper written by John J. McCann of Polaroid Corporation, published by The International Society for Optical Engineering in 1990 under the title “Psychophysical measurements of Hannah color/distance effects.” There is a chapter on Hannah in the book Twenty Oil Painters and How they Work, published in 1978 by American Artist Magazine. He is also featured in the book The Technique of Collage by Helen Hutton, published by Batsford Books, London.Hannah maintained memberships in Central California’s Carmel Art Association, Artists Equity Association, and Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation, as well as the Art Center in Pacific Grove, the city where he worked in a second-floor art studio above Lighthouse Avenue and where he lived for twenty years until his passing in 2010. His work is held by San Francisco's Exploratorium; Kodak in Rochester, New York; Temple University Health Sciences Center; and the New London Maritime Society, New London, Connecticut, among many other public and private collections.In 2002 an arts writer described Hannah as “…a dapper gentleman wearing a beret and checkered pants reminiscent of his geometrically-precise artworks. Hannah tells me he has been a painter since 1944. He is fascinated by color and light and the perceptual tricks that the brain plays on all of us. As he put it, For thirty years I've been conducting non-objective studies in color perception to determine how color relationships will change in hue, chromaticity and value when viewing distance is altered.”