Mt. Lebanon student’s artwork featured at Handmade Arcade
Ask Mt. Lebanon artist Hannah Jones about how she got started, and she’s ready with an answer.
“I have my ‘hero origin story’ about the blue cat,” she’ll say, the tale of a preschool assignment when she was 3 or so. “They give the kids a bunch of blue paint and a piece of paper and maybe a brush. I’m not sure. Maybe it’s just finger painting. Either way, they all turn out as blobs.”
Hannah Jones with her pen-and-watercolor “Poorly Insulated Window”
Not hers, though.
“The story I’ve been told is that what I drew was a square with four legs and a tail and a head and two ears, and it was a cat. And apparently all the teachers at the preschool were freaking out. They had never seen that before in however many years they had worked there.”
Now a senior at Mt. Lebanon High School, Hannah is taking her artistic pursuits in an entrepreneurial direction. She is selling prints of her paintings and illustrations, and some designs have made their way onto T-shirts.
On Dec. 8, she’ll have the opportunity to display her work at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center during Handmade Arcade, Pittsburgh’s premier craft fair, as one of the artists selected for the Youth Maker Scholarship Program offered in conjunction with the event. The program is supported by a Great Remake micro-grant from Remake Leaning and the Grable Foundation.
Hannah is eminently familiar with Handmade Arcade, having attended the annual event since she was in elementary school.
“I’m a fan of it,” she said. “The artists there are really nice, and you can talk with them.”
In turn, she can enlighten them about her art, much of which focuses on animals, including at least one cryptozoological creature that she display on her business card:
“This creature is like a scaly pangolin-cat-gargoyle,” she explained, and in case you never have heard of the first part of that equation, pangolins are anteaters with large, protective keratin scales covering their skin, the only mammals known to have them.
All eight pangolin species are protected under national and international laws, and two are listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of threatened species.
“The Sixth Mass Extinction,” by Hannah Jones
Their status is particularly relevant for Hannah in relation to her complex gel pen and watercolor piece “The Sixth Mass Extinction,” which contains the images of 54 bygone animal species intertwined in the shape of a skull.
“I had to do a lot of research for that,” she said. “I looked into each animal, found out how it went extinct, if people were connected. A lot of times they were. And then I also wanted to make sure that I wasn’t putting any subspecies in there,” such as the West African black and Madagascan dwarf varieties of rhinoceroses.
Polish chickens, though, still are plentiful, and the breed’s distinctive crest of head feathers inspired Hannah to design one for a screen-printing class she took at the Artsmiths of Pittsburgh in Mt. Lebanon.
“I don’t know what made me decide to draw it, but it turned out great on a shirt,” the daughter of Charles and Dana Jones said. “The whole family was like, ‘Oh, make me one!’ Everybody in the family wanted one of my chicken shirts.”
As a student in Jennifer Rodriguez’s advanced placement art class at Mt. Lebanon High School, Hannah showed her work at the exceptionally well-attended class art show in April. Students were on hand to greet visitors and talk about their art in a professional manner.
“I kind of felt good in that environment,” Hannah recalled, “which surprised me, because I don’t really consider myself a public speaker or anything.”
And so she’ll be prepared to greet those in attendance at Handmade Arcade, possibly with a brief summary of her “hero origin story.”
For more information about Hannah Jones’ art, visit www.hannahjonesart.com.