Hands reach through the sky. Swirls of bright blues and oranges dance across landscapes. Texture emerges from fragments of encyclopedia pages, where academic facts dissolve into abstract beauty. These motifs ripple throughout Hannah Jeanne Semenko’s paintings.
The text embedded in her work tells its own story of metamorphosis — once part of a leather-bound encyclopedia set initially gifted by her parents to prepare her for university life. As she entered her 30s, these repositories of traditional learning underwent their own evolution.
“I’d line up the beautiful brown leather-bound books — they had gold leaf edges, they were gorgeous and I’d use them to make my house cozy,” she says. “But then, eventually, I found myself tearing them apart to repurpose them.”
Just as she liberates words from their structured pages to find new meaning in art, Semenko has freed herself from conventional expectations. A year ago, she left her corporate recruiting career to commit herself to painting — a parallel act of creative destruction and rebirth.
“Being an introvert, and an artist, that corporate world wasn’t really my passion,” she explains. “So I figured if I were to make myself uncomfortable going to work in a job every day that wasn’t authentic to me, I could also make myself uncomfortable in a different way to put myself out there as an artist.”
Semenko’s recently been recognized in the internationally juried Teravarna Art Competition. Seven works received awards.
Art has always been a part of her life. “I remember when my dad was on the road, I’d fax pictures I’d drawn to him,” she recalls of her relationship with her father, the late, great Oiler Dave Semenko.
“And my mom filled our house with Renoir, Van Gogh, Monet — she was a sketch artist herself.”
After a brief cartoon-drawing phase, Semenko’s interests went to landscapes as a young girl, then to her post-secondary studies in art history and theology at MacEwan University. The influences of her education can be seen in the progression of her early works, which were dark and spiritual.
“I thought my art had to be serious when I just started,” which we see in “Reaching for Understanding,” “Architects of the Universe” and “Death.” The latter work was in part a response to the untimely passing of her father. “I felt the need to be sophisticated, in these dark, deep abstractions that matched my mood as I was searching for understanding,” Semenko says.
The bridge piece between these themes is composed of bright, light colours and whimsical themes where “my inner child is just having fun.” It’s titled “Ethics and Strawberries.” Her multimedia approach in the painting incorporates beads, text, the spine of a book, broken China, and black-and-white photograph clippings. Her next experiment — and expansion of the aforementioned “Inner Child” — will have her work on a larger surface, a canvas 69-by-50 inches, taking inspiration in part from her grandmother’s garden.
“Every time I finish a piece, I say it’s my favourite,” she says, looking forward to when she’ll have a showing in a gallery space to accommodate her use of texture and multimedia. “I’d really like a space where people can have a physical understanding of my work.”
This article appears in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of Edify
