About Leanne Hanson
I paint original oil landscapes exploring how light transforms color across the natural world — painted in luminous, transparent layers.
Leanne Hanson's art has garnered recognition and numerous awards, including acceptance in over 50 juried art fairs, with paintings of sun-dappled forests and luminous meadows rendered with an artist's attention to color and light. Born and raised in Duluth, Minnesota, Leanne's childhood unfolded in a landscape of rich green woods and babbling streams. Her mother tended the home's flower gardens bursting with color, while her father — a watercolorist and head of the art department at the University of Minnesota — filled the family home with the spirit of creative inquiry and artistic tradition.
From her earliest memories, art was never a question, but an identity. "I have always thought of myself as an artist," Leanne recalls. That conviction was affirmed in high school, when she sold her first painting at an art auction. Formal education followed, blending intensive art classes with a degree in landscape design, while mentorship under her father deepened her artistic voice and technical skill. "He taught me patience," she says, "and the ability to see the world not just for what it is, but for the energy and emotion it holds."
After college, Leanne balanced art with family and the demands of business, continuing to create watercolors part-time for three decades. With her children grown, Hanson took a decisive leap: oil painting became her new language, and she embraced art as her full-time pursuit. Her creative process is rooted in the natural world. Every painting begins on her walks, with reference photos and video capturing a specific moment of light or color before it changes. Back in her studio, she sketches lightly, lays an underpainting, and then builds each composition in jewel-like layers and glazes, investing her images with energy, depth, and richness.
"I see my painting style as realistic impressionism — the color and light of impressionism, disciplined by the precision of hand-drawn design." Her hallmark is bold, high-contrast color and layered, radiant light — a technique that gives each landscape more brilliance than the scene itself held. "My process draws on a long tradition of American landscape painting focused on the quiet study of light — building luminosity through layered glazing rather than direct color, in the spirit of 19th-century light-focused landscape work."
More than technique, though, it is Hanson's intention that makes her work singular. "I'm drawn to the moments most people walk past without noticing," she says. "The way light moves through a field for just a few minutes at dusk, the exact color water turns right before the sun drops. I want a painting to hold that moment still, so it doesn't just pass by." Her work has drawn collectors and gallery interest across the Upper Midwest, a response to paintings that ask the viewer to look at a familiar landscape as if for the first time.
Leanne continues to exhibit her work in galleries and national art fairs, building a body of work centered on the Luminous Landscapes series — original oils that hold a single, vivid moment of light in place.
