JUL IUS DEWITT HANAH
But painting?
“Painting came so late for me,”
says Hannah, who finally picked up his
paintbrush six years ago at the age of
40. “I was intimidated by it, the color
aspect, and the craft of it.”
Glancing around his basement
studio at his Moreland neighborhood
home, it’s clear that the self-taught
painter is no longer intimidated.
Hannah’s acrylic paintings, mostly
abstracts, flood the room with color,
teeming with a chaos of brushstrokes
and spatters often brought to order by
a layer of lines. Other canvases highlight
his pen-and-pad roots featuring female
figures, African masks, and a hip-hop
sensibility from a past career promoting
local bands.
“Painting
came late
for me.
I was
intimidated
by it.”
Julius DeWitt Hannah
always had confidence
in his pen.
By Joe Miller
Photographed by Angelo Merendino
Capturing the tiniest details of a
face in his sketchpad came easy to
the 1992 Shaker Heights High
School graduate. Drawing a
fantastical animé scene straight
out of superhero lore was a snap.
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