Gaylen Hansen
American, born 1921
- Names
Hansen, Gaylen
Gaylen Hansen
- Born
Brigham City 1921
- Active
- Occupation or Type
painter
- Bio
Gaylen Hansen grew up on a farm in northern Utah, where he rode his first saddle pony at the age of six. He has studied or taught art in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and Yakima and Pullman, Washington. During sixty years of painting, most of the forms of modern art have influenced his work--but in the mid-1970s, he says, "it became clear that keeping up with all those art movements out of New York was no longer imperative." Out of this realization arose Hansen's singular narrative painting style featuring the adventures of a fictional character, Kernal Bentleg. His nonspecific settings are mythic and often humorous representations of the high desert country in southeastern Washington where Hansen has lived for the past forty-five years.
Artist biography reproduced with permission of Katharine Harmon, author of The Pacific Northwest Landscape: A Painted History.
- Gender
Male
