Aedan Hanley Fine Arts

08/21/2026

I spent 2½ years thinking there was a secret everyone else knew.

08/19/2026

08/19/2026

For years I assumed artistic development would be easiest to see by looking at what changed.

I'm beginning to think the more interesting evidence may be what refuses to disappear.

This week I put a small group of paintings from early 2024 through 2026 into chronological order. I expected to see a fairly straightforward movement from abstraction toward psychological figuration.

Instead, I saw the figures much earlier.

They were buried in the surfaces. Repeated in crowds. Reduced to profiles and outlines. Sometimes almost incidental.

Then they moved forward.

By 2025 I was spending much more time with bodies, faces, identity, vulnerability, performance and the distance between what someone presents and what they may actually be feeling.

Eventually the animals entered the work too—and somehow began carrying many of those same emotional questions.

The techniques have changed considerably.

The questions underneath them apparently haven't changed nearly as much.

That's something I didn't fully understand about my own work until I saw these paintings together.

And because I'm still making the work, I don't consider this a conclusion.

It's just the thread I can finally see.

08/17/2026

🎉 I earned the emerging talent badge this week, recognizing me for creating engaging content that sparks an interest among my fans! Woohoo! Thank you Facebook Business. It has been a long journey. I hope my content and art reach wider audiences bringing attention to my creative process and the really enjoyable artistry I create.

08/17/2026

I thought these paintings belonged to different chapters of my work.

"Me Falling For You" was made in 2024, very early in my return to a sustained studio practice. "Registered Pressure" came much later, after my technique and visual language had changed considerably.

I would once have told you they had very little in common.

Looking at them together now, I see the connection almost immediately.

In both, I build structure and then start interfering with it. Shapes are made unstable. Lines interrupt larger forms. Order gets established just long enough for something else to push against it.

What changed was the vocabulary.

What apparently didn’t change was the impulse.

I don’t paint the way I did in "Me Falling For You" anymore.

But I’m beginning to think I’ve been asking paintings to misbehave for much longer than I realized.

08/16/2026

I thought I knew why I kept this painting.

In January 2024, I was only a few paintings into becoming a full-time artist again after nearly four decades away from a sustained studio practice.

I was genuinely starting over.

I knew how to make art. What I knew almost nothing about was being a working artist in 2024—social media, websites, submissions, marketing, branding. I didn't even have an Instagram account yet.

Me Falling For You was one of those very early works.

24 × 30 in. • acrylic and acrylic pen • repurposed 1.5-in. canvas

It originally had a companion painting called You Being You. Both began as thrift-store canvases that I painted over.

At the time, I was enormously pleased with Me Falling For You. My old graphic-design training seemed to be waking back up: color, composition, typography—and especially the idea of making rigid block letters behave almost fluidly as “ME” literally fell through the painting.

I thought the titles were simply a slightly clichéd visual joke.

Looking at the two works again this week made me realize something I had never consciously considered:

I think they were about my husband and me.

You Being You was later destroyed during a move. Me Falling For You survived.

I wouldn't paint this way today. My technique and visual language have changed enormously.

But I still love those tumbling letters.

And now I understand something about this painting that I apparently wasn't ready to understand when I made it.

Sometimes the work knows before the artist does.

08/14/2026

***Disclaimer: I lost my voice, so I sound like Mickey Mouse, according to my husband. LOL. Please forgive the sound of my VO.

This is what returning to painting full-time actually looked like for me in 2024.

*Coronado Dreamin’* began as a 15 × 35-inch decorative canvas I bought for $6 at Goodwill in Phoenix. At the time, a comparable new canvas at Michaels was $69 plus tax. I had recently retired and returned to painting after decades away, and I simply couldn’t afford to continually buy new canvases while trying to rebuild a serious studio practice.

Repurposing thrift-store canvases solved that problem—and kept perfectly usable supports from being discarded.

This one became a commission for a friend who loved Coronado Island and San Diego but wanted something very different from the predictable realistic depictions of the Hotel Del Coronado.

At the same time, I had become fascinated with Spanish artist Sergio Aranda’s squeegee paintings. I watched his process obsessively. The effects he could pull from that simple tool fascinated me, and for a while the squeegee became my primary way of moving paint.

Two years later, I still use one regularly—but it is now only one tool among many.

Looking back at this painting, I don’t see an artist I want to imitate again. I see the beginning of instincts I still recognize: scraping, covering, revealing, disrupting and allowing what came before to affect what comes next.

**The tools changed. The instinct to transform didn’t.**

08/12/2026

One of the more difficult disciplines in painting is recognizing when the urge to “fix” something is actually the urge to make it safer.

In "Nothing’s Wrong", the arm and shoulder became one of those places for me. I kept returning to that passage because it never resolved in the clean, comfortable way I expected.

Eventually I had to ask a different question: was the discomfort actually a problem—or was it contributing to the tension of the painting?

There is a point when continued refinement can begin removing the very thing that gave a work its life. Learning to recognize that point has become as important to me as knowing how to keep working.

Sometimes stopping is not an admission that the painting is unfinished. It is a decision to let the painting remain slightly unsettled.

**How do you recognize when something is truly finished—and when further improvement might actually make it worse?**

08/10/2026

At this point, the figure had enough presence. The problem was everything around it.

The background had started behaving like support rather than participating in the painting. I wanted the negative space, scale shifts and interruptions around the figure to contribute to the same psychological tension.

So I began pushing the surrounding field harder—not simply adding more, but changing where the eye could rest and where it couldn’t.

The goal wasn’t a busier painting. It was a less passive one.

Where does your eye go first now—the figure or the field around it?

08/09/2026

What interested me at this stage wasn’t simply making a recognizable figure appear.

The abstract surface already had a history before the face arrived—scraping, veils, blocked passages, transferred textures and areas that had been removed and rebuilt. Once I began constructing the figure, I wanted some of that instability to remain visible rather than polishing it away.

The handwritten tout va bien!—“everything’s fine”—eventually became a useful contradiction. There is an attempt at composure in the figure, while almost everything around and within it suggests something less settled.

I’m deliberately holding back the complete painting for now.

When you look at this detail, what do you read first: control or unease?