Bio Joan Hanley was born in Queens, New York; the daughter and granddaughter of firefighters. She studied at Hartford Art School, the School of Visual Arts NY and has a MFA from Vermont College. For the past 25 years she has lived and painted in New Hampshire with breaks for a Residency year in Dublin, Ireland and teaching in Mexico, China, Taiwan and England. Her studio sits at the foot of Mt. Monadnock on Thorndike Pond. Her work is held in collections across the US, Canada and Europe. She has exhibited at the Fitchburg Art Museum, MA, Brattleboro Museum, VT, the Mariposa Museum, NH, the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Attleboro Museum, MA among others. Artist Statement Alice Neel juried Joan Hanley into her first show, and she works in her tradition of personal, American painting that also includes Fairfield Porter, Milton Avery and Lois Dodd with a dash of the mystic artist Leonora Carrington. She paints the ordinary strangeness of life. She loves paradox, a result of a life long practice of meditation and an interest in image-based psychology. She works in traditional materials, oil paint on canvas, linen and board, gouache on paper, but her subjects are contemporary. She paints life as she sees and experiences it- seen and unseen.