Open SkiesAI

Look up at the sky in this painting and you might feel like you are watching clouds drift by on a warm evening. Erin Hanson fills the scene with swirling blues, purples, and soft golds, all built from thick, deliberate strokes of color. She calls her style "Open Impressionism," a modern take on the classic Impressionist approach. What makes her work stand out is the bold, mosaic-like brushwork, where each dab of paint sits cleanly next to the next without much blending. It gives the whole canvas a glowing, almost stained-glass quality.

The land at the bottom feels small compared to the enormous sky above it, and that seems to be the point. Hanson is a California-based painter who grew up exploring the outdoors, and her love of wide open landscapes shows up again and again in her art. She often paints quickly and without reworking her strokes, which keeps the energy fresh and alive. Here, the rays of light breaking through the clouds give the piece a calm, hopeful mood, the kind of sky you might pull over to the side of the road just to watch for a while.