Hannah Dray Vokey
Hannah graduated from Hartwick College in Oneonta, NY with a BA in fine arts. After graduation she worked at the Hill Holliday advertising agency in Boston, MA while perusing her interests in portrait drawing on the side with noted Boston School painter Robert Cormier. Cormier invited Hannah to be one of his students at the R.H.Ives Gammell Atelier on Newbury Street, a full scholarship program teaching classical drawing in combination with impressionistic color and seeing. After a few years at the Gammell atelier she furthered her studies with another noted Boston School painter, Paul Ingbretson at the Ingbertson Studios located in Framingham, Ma (now in Lowell, MA).
After her formal training, Hannah decided to put her pursuit of drawing and painting to the side for a while in order to focus on her career working as a graphic artist for Lotus Development in Cambridge, MA, then as a website developer for a customer relationship software company, also in Cambridge, MA, before working as a freelancer.
Interesting enough, it was her great passion for surfing that ultimately inspired her to pullout her paints again and move back to pursuing art fulltime. Spending all that time in the ocean allowed her to experience the wonderful moments only an ocean perspective can offer, such as how the changing light of the day effects the color of the water and sky all around her, and the need to put these impressions down on canvas became too strong to ignore. She began by doing what she calls memory “Surf art”, an artistic process where she jotted down notes and made sketches of all that she remembered seeing, and even feeling while out surfing that day. Her notes reflected on observations such as fleeting colors and light effects, such as early morning ocean sparkle, the different cloud formations she saw at sunrise or sunset, or how on some days the shallower water suddenly turned an emerald green color on a brisk fall afternoon as a squall passed further outside the break, or how the water would turn a smokey grey-green and look like glass on the days where she watched a fog roll in all around her as she sat waiting for a wave on her surfboard. She also painted “fantasy” surf paintings, ones with surf spots she wished existed and with a perfect peeling wave to ride!
Eventually Hannah made the full move back towards her original love of plein air landscape painting, portraits and still life work, but she is so grateful for the memory and imaginative paintings she did with her surf art because she feels her having to rely on her memory and “mind’s eye” to paint the atmosphere and color she saw out on the water has aided her in being more sensitive to seeing and capturing the color and atmosphere in her plein air paintings on land.
