Hannah Stevenson

Hannah Stevenson, born 1964, a British artist and traveller, she follows in the footsteps of past British women travellers who discovered themselves in far-­flung climes. She trained at Edinburgh College of Art, and worked with Mark and Lottie Cheverton, founders of the Leith School Of Art. She has exhibited on an international scale, with solo shows in Cairo, and abroad . Private collections in Egypt, Middle East, Europe, China and The USA.

Whilst the previous generation absorbed the romance of societies and landscapes that had barely changed in centuries, Stevenson moves through a world in a state of industrial and post-­‐ industrial flux on a scale that has never been seen before.
Stevenson trained at Edinburgh College of Art and worked with Mark and Lottie Cheverton, founders of the Leith School of Art.
She began painting on metal in Brussels influenced by the works of Robert Rauschenberg and Gerhard Richter. Working in car paint on sheets of steel three metres high, she produced a series of abstracted images of the Stations of the Cross for the vast, gloomy interior of the city’s Protestant Cathedral. In Istanbul, she became preoccupied with the interaction of East and West, creating a series of paintings on metal for one of the city’s leading textile companies, employing contrasts of hot and cool colour, inspired by the ceaseless movement of the shipping on the Bosphorous and the sculptural forms of Istanbul’s mosques.
In Moscow, Stevenson’s artistic production grew in intensity. Long fascinated by Constructivism and Suprematism, she gained first-­hand experience of these ideas studying under veteran Moscow painter Andrei Sakharov. Using a ballroom in the British Embassy as a studio, she produced large abstracted landscapes with strong, flat planes and curving lines that felt jewel-­‐like despite their huge size. Working with high gloss submarine paint on sheets of anodised aluminium, she employed a palette that was redolent for her of a timeless Russia: crimson, a washed out green, orange, yellow and cerulean blue.
Inspired to depict the immense 27 kilometre long steel works at Magnitogorsk, Stevenson headed for the plant in Siberia, staying in a local hostel, as she did drawings for 20 large panels showing the processes of steel production.
Whilst living in Cairo, she found herself drawn to perspectival views through the arches of mosques and bazaars – spaces which found their inverse form in the dunes of the desert and the mountain of her next location. Switzerland. Living in Geneva, she became entranced by the marbled effects created by laying large quantities of enamel paint onto aluminium to evoke the rock escarpments of the Eiger and Montblanc. Her life in China produced works using printing and painting with ink and lacquers on plexiglass and metal as Stevenson continued the industrial theme . Whilst in her last years in China , Stevenson began to move her interest away from the urban landscapes towards drawings she had accumulated from her travels. Her landscapes on paper and canvas