DANA HATCHETT
Dana Hatchett is a professional artist who earned a BFA in Painting from S.U.N.Y. at Purchase in 1980, and an MFA in Painting from S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo in 1992. He retired in 2017 from his position as a professor at Daemen College, and taught art classes at Erie Community College and S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo. His work has appeared in many venues throughout the years, including in the juried Amid/In WNY 2025 at Hallwalls. His collages appeared in a solo show at the Crucible Art Collective in March 2025. His coolage won an Honorable Mention award at the Buffalo Society of Artists’ 128th Catalogue Exhibition in 2024.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In this series of collages from 2023-2024, I want to show how an artist can take works of the past to create new works. While looking at a series of abstract paintings I did twenty or more years ago I realized that I could improve upon the compositions by cutting them down into smaller sections and recombining them.
Three different types of abstract paintings were disassembled to begin these new works. One type of work was color field painting that relied on water based spraying techniques that contrasted thickly poured surfaces with sprayed fields of dispersed color. Another was a series of oil and acrylic paintings based on shapes that were thickly done. The third type was a more recent series of oil paintings on paper.
I generally destroy and reassemble the work multiple times, changing size and scale in the process. I add gouache and/or ink to some of the works. Discovery of the work and what it calls for occurs through intentionally recreating it.
My goal with this work is to be able to keep growing, expanding and developing new and differing types of approaches. My concern is not to create attractive decorative works of art but to evoke more complex states of mind that are unexpected and irregular by nature. Its historicity defines its potential reading in the mind of the viewer.