PittsburgH Post-Gazette
June 2022

By Marylynne Pitz

Jamie Hanna remembers with love how her father, David, showed her how to scramble low across the rocky coast outside the family’s home in Maine.

Now, as she travels the U.S. visiting museums and the private homes of art collectors, she is developing a new appreciation for David Hanna the artist.

As a boy growing up in Manchester on Pittsburgh’s North Side, he spent his free time sketching and learning about antiques.

“He had this imperative to be creative,” Ms. Hanna said, adding that when she contacts museums or art collectors, “it’s almost as if they have been waiting for my phone call. It’s a great way for me to reconnect with people I grew up with.”

As she travels from her home in Pemaquid, Maine, to see her father’s work in collections in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Washington, D.C., the journey fuels her appreciation for the 400 egg tempera, oil and watercolor paintings, drawings and sculptures Hanna created during a fruitful, 15-year career. He suffered a heart attack and died at age 39 in 1981.

Ms. Hanna’s goal is to create a complete catalog of her father’s artworks so they can reach a wider audience. In 2019, she launched www.davidhanna.org and a nonprofit, the David Hanna Trust. She believes the research could inform a retrospective exhibition, a documentary about his life and career, or both. 

She is not daunted by creative projects. In 2008, she launched Zobha, a California-based line of yoga and fitness apparel, and sold the company in 2011.

Now, with the help of an art historian, archivist and fine art photographer, she is creating a database while cataloging and researching the provenance of her father’s drawings, paintings and sculpture.

“These works have surrounded me my whole life,” Ms. Hanna said during a recent visit to Pittsburgh. The fourth of seven children, she was 16 when her father died.

Charismatic, graceful and handsome, David Hanna was the youngest of 12 children who spent his childhood on Bidwell Street. By 1959, he was the lead dance instructor at Continental Dance Studio, where he met his future wife, Carolyn Elco, a fellow teacher from Donora. After their 1960 marriage, he enlisted in the Army, training at Fort Bragg with the 82nd Airborne and serving in the Green Berets during the Vietnam War.

As a 24-year-old father of three, David Hanna painted a picture to cover a hole in the wall of his family’s rented apartment. A building manager saw it, said he knew the organizer of the Pittsburgh Playhouse amateur art show and asked if he wanted to enter.

Hanna sold 15 of his 17 paintings. Among the people who bought his paintings in that 1965 exhibition were Squirrel Hill residents Myrna and Mark Mason, who befriended and supported the artist, as did Constance Prosser Mellon of the Mellon banking family. Another buyer was Dr. John Inghram, a prominent Pittsburgh orthopedic surgeon. He taught the artist about anatomy, especially useful knowledge for a portrait painter.

For most of 1966, Hanna took painting lessons from Carolyn Wyeth, a member of the famous Wyeth family of artists, in Chadds Ford, Pa. Other exhibitions followed and in 1967, the Hanna family moved to Maine. A particular spot there holds magical childhood memories for Ms. Hanna, who was 3 when her family moved into the caretaker’s lighthouse on Pemaquid Point in Bristol.

It was “a child’s dream,” she said, because the lighthouse is framed by granite cliffs and offered a clear view of magnificent storms with crashing waves.

“There were times that the waves were so aggressive that we had to leave. We would go to a local hotel that was more inland,” she recalled.

Eventually, the Hannas moved out of the lighthouse and into a home David built of reclaimed brick and replaned wood on Round Pond in Bristol.

“Everything about it was historical,” said Josh Hanna, the artist’s son who lives in Mill Valley, Calif. “He did a lot of the work himself,” adding that his father built an addition on the house, which was filled with antiques.

Pemaquid Point also provided new subjects for the artist, particularly Alex Breede, a retired sea captain whose portrait he painted several times. “Two Different Horizons,” a haunting 1971 portrait, shows Breede and the artist’s son, David, then age 4.

Earlier this year, Ms. Hanna saw, for the first time, another portrait of Breede hanging in the home of a woman who lives on Pittsburgh’s South Side. That compelling portrait is titled “Final Farewell.”

While he lived in Maine, Hanna continued exhibiting his work here at the International Art Gallery in the South Hills. In 1977, his canvases hung at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, where director Paul A. Chew wrote in the exhibition catalog:

“It is gratifying to see David Hanna developing a personal, stylistic interpretation of the American tradition of realist painting that has been established by some of our greatest artists — Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper."

During Ms. Hanna’s recent visit to Pittsburgh, she reconnected with Jane Mason Grasso, the daughter of Myrna and Mark Mason. The Masons and the Hannas vacationed together one summer on Nantucket and several of Hanna’s works are prominently displayed in their Squirrel Hill home. In 1972, Hanna drew Mrs. Mason, titling the artwork “Drawing of a Friend for a Friend.”

In the summer of 1972, the Hanna family traveled to London, England, staying in the neighborhood of Chelsea. Every day, the artist visited London museums and galleries and also saw a collection of Leonardo Da Vinci artworks at Windsor Castle.

Before his untimely death, Hanna planned to paint 35 historic structures in Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut. In the mid-1970s, he painted Upper Mills in Tarrytown, N.Y., now a museum. Among his surviving artworks are drawings and sketches of these landmarks.

“It was what he was working on when he died,” Jamie Hanna said.

On a rainy day in April 2018, she returned to Tarrytown. She saw the kind of landscape that her late father loved to paint.

“Nothing was blooming yet. It was gray,” she recalled.

“Going to Upper Mills was a real trigger for me. It’s a beautiful setting, timeless in a way. … That was the moment that I decided that I was going to do this.”

That visit reminded Ms. Hanna of a childhood experience, too. At age 10 or 12, she joined her father on a road trip from Maine to Pittsburgh. En route, they stopped at Keith House in Upper Makefield, Pa., the 230-acre Bucks County farm where George Washington planned his daring crossing of the Delaware River.

“I’ll never forget him sketching all of the stones in the house,” she said.

Josh Hanna prizes the sketch his father made of him when he was a boy. He also remembers dancing after dinner.

“I thought it was normal that when dinner ended, people got up and danced.”

On the last evening he saw his father, the family danced to music by Earth, Wind and Fire.

“I danced with my dad the day he left home and never came back home,” he said. “Dance was part of that artistry.”

Marylynne Pitz (mlpitz27@gmail.com) is a Pittsburgh-based arts journalist.