LECTURE: Trenton Doyle Hancock talking to a VCUQ audience about his artwork.    Photo by Umer Nangiana

By Umer Nangiana

With his elaborate drawings, colour-prints, paintings and murals, he creates a world of Mounds, the half animal, half plant creatures and their aggressors, the Vegans.
Processed through his “eyes, brain and hands”, each work of art by the artist chronicles the birth, life, death, afterlife and even dream states of the Mounds and Vegans. At the core of this world lies his unfolding narrative between good and evil.  
Trenton Doyle Hancock, 41-year-old American artist, puts his cast of characters through a mythological battle. His works are suffused with personal mythology presented in an operatic scale, often reinterpreting Biblical stories that the artist learned as a child.
“Something good or evil, it is a matter of perspectives, morals and ethics. Under the umbrella of art you kind of have a free reign to assign new meanings to all of these things,” believes Hancock.
“At least for myself, what I was told as a child was the truth that this is clearly good and this is clearly evil; growing up I realised some of those things that I was told Biblically, I would like to challenge. And I think art for me was a safe zone that helped me to challenge those things and perhaps grow as a person,” the artist told Community in an interview here recently after his lecture at Virginia Commonwealth University-Qatar (VCUQ) as part of Crossing Boundaries lecture series.
The artist is influenced equally by the history of painting as by the pulp imagery of pop-culture. Hancock attracted a huge audience to his talk as many would want to know the origins of his mythological world Mounds and how does it operate.
The Mound came in fact from an investigation that Hancock was doing during his undergraduate. “I wanted to paint the figure but I wanted to paint the figure in a different way. I started painting it the normal way with arms and legs and then I thought about the idea of assets or what do we need as humans to exist,” said the artist.
“We do not really need arms, we do not need legs. We just need the head and the middle part. So I just started painting figures with those parts and they became kind of Mounds,” elaborates Hancock in the light of his mythology.
But they were not Mounds as yet.
“I started doing another investigation about race, thinking about black skin, white skin and all the things in between. But the polarity of white and black became very interesting to me so these creatures they started to take black and white stripes on them,” said Hancock. And so, the figures had finally become the Mounds.
But how did the Mounds go on to form their own world and came across their aggressors, the Vegans?
“I had several investigations going on at the same time. Over the course of time they all grew and started to touch one another and the points where they touched, created opportunity for dialogues between those two different factions or themes,” Hancock replied, further explaining how the stories of Mounds started to happen.
The Mounds’ world was the by-product of these stories. Through the use of different mediums and materials, this world grew bigger and bigger.
“I call myself additive artist. I do not subtract things away too much, I am constantly adding to the world. Time works differently within that world,” says Hancock.
Time-wise, he says, this world goes back to the beginning of time and how far can he go into future, he does not know. He dreams of it going past his own death. That is how vast the world of Mounds is.
Hancock says he has discovered realms and these realms operate in terms of what is above ground and what is under the ground. It works at different levels of spiritual landscapes like some landscapes within ourselves that we unlock.
There are different planes that these characters operate on, some of them are connected while others are not.
“I am constantly running back and forth, trying to make these connections, make paintings, make drawings, do writings that describe those intersections,” the artist explained as he went about his method of story-telling.
While he does not always write something before he paints, there is always some form of writing involved. Sometimes, it is more of an oblique kind of connection and at other time, it is a one-to-one connection where he almost illustrates what he writes.
Fifteen years ago, when he started the work of writing the narrative of the Mounds, it was more about the series, so he was trying to plug everything into that story. However, a few years ago, it was more about an excavation of the self.
“I was doing a lot self-portraiture thinking in terms of very abstract psychological ways of portraying the Mound-scape and that work was a lot looser. And now the work that I am working on is more like based on illustration again,” said Hancock.
“Actually, I have written way more than I have visually described. So I have my work cut out for the next five years easily because I like to do animation, continue my work with toys and sculptures and obviously continue the paintings,” he said of his future plans.
Starting with printmaking, Hancock has experimented with different materials and mediums narrative his visual stories. Recently, he did sculptures. He has also done murals, painting performance, videos and most recently animations.
“I think I try to offer up Mounds in so many different facets that they come to life with each viewer. When I animate them it is a more passive thing for the viewer because he can just sit there and watch. I find it very different,” said Hancock, referring to his experience with animation.
With repeated references of brain in his work, the artists said he thinks about brain quite a lot in terms of its connection with eyes. “As visual artists, things are going into your eyes and then they hit your brain before they get to your hand so I have recently been doing a lot of paintings with eyes, brain and hands, kind of disregarding all the rest of it,” said Hancock.
Hancock’s mythology has been translated to the stage in an original ballet, “Cult of Color: Call to Color”, commissioned by Ballet Austin and created by Trenton Doyle Hancock, choreographer Stephen Mills and composer Graham Reynolds.
The ballet performances debuted in Austin in April 2008.