Hannah Odum grew up in Bland, Virginia, and she paints like someone who has spent a lifetime looking at the same mountains and never gotten tired of them.
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Streamline
Oil on Panel
16 x 16Â
That's the thing about her landscape art. It isn't trying to be a postcard. A lot of landscape painting wants to show you exactly where you are: this river, this ridge, this specific bend in the road. Hannah's work does something else. She calls her landscapes ambiguous on purpose. Fog rolls in over the treeline. Light gets soft at the edges. You recognize the feeling of a place before you recognize the place itself.
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Free People
Acrylic on Canvas
48 x 48Â
Painting like a memory
Hannah works in both oil and acrylic. She starts fast, in acrylic, laying down big shapes and gestures while the paint dries quick enough to keep up with her. Oil comes in later, when she's ready to slow down: refining edges, deepening shadows, softening a shoreline until it feels less like a photograph and more like something half-remembered.
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Dark Valley Run
Oil on Canvas
48 x 48
That's really the whole project. Hannah isn't painting specific locations so much as she's painting what it feels like to remember one. Growing up surrounded by the Appalachian Mountains will do that to you. The work sits in the space between what you saw and what you think you saw, which is a much more interesting place to paint from.
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Weather as an Entity.
Ask Hannah what she's thinking about and she'll bring up petrichor, the smell of earth right before it rains. It's been her touchstone for the last year. Storm clouds, fog, wind moving through trees, that pressure in the air before weather actually happens. If you've ever noticed cattle lying down before a storm rolls in, you already understand the feeling she's after. Something sublime, a little unsettling, a little exciting.
Rooted in a longer tradition of landscape art
Hannah's influences run from Richard Mayhew's cerebral approach to landscape, to the unfinished, breathing brushwork of Rackstraw Downes, back further to Corot and Sargent, painters she says she returns to again and again. It's a lineage that treats landscape art not as documentation, but as a language for memory and atmosphere. You can feel that history underneath her work without it ever feeling like homage.
See the work
Hannah's new landscape paintings, including Free People, Dark Valley Run, Frog Pond, and Liz, are on the online now at Formato Fine Arts. Original landscape art pieces are available for those who want a bit of Appalachian fog and light for their own walls.
Follow her at @hannahodum to see what's coming off the easel next.
Visit us
Formato Fine Arts, 100 W Main Street, Wytheville, Virginia.
Thursday through Saturday, 11 to 3.
Sunday through Wednesday by appointment.
