Eric Dwight Hancock’s abstracted paintings transform trees, forests, and other natural imagery into dreamlike reflections on memory and place. Born in 1982 and raised in rural Georgia, Eric was shaped by the experience of looking upward through the forest understory, as well as by the magazines, illustrations, memorabilia, and artworks that surrounded him during childhood. Encounters with Japanese woodblock prints and a monumental mosaic in Central Florida further developed his fascination with mystery, distortion, and visual narrative. Through veiled color, fractured forms, and shifting perspectives, Eric turns remembered landscapes into scenes poised between recognition and fantasy.

“For the most part, I’m an abstract painter, so I have a pretty tumultuous relationship with solid form and narrative.”

In his Los Angeles studio, Eric draws from childhood memories, natural imagery, and the visual character of places he has inhabited. Rather than resolving a landscape into a stable scene, he allows forms to emerge, disappear, and reassemble through layers of acrylic, oil pastel, line, and color. Trees bend, space becomes discontinuous, and solid forms are nearly absorbed by their surroundings.

This exploratory process reflects Eric’s affinity for Los Angeles, where grit and beauty exist in close proximity. His willingness to follow diversions, interruptions, and moments of denial gives the paintings their surreal logic, allowing them to function less like descriptions of specific places than lucid dreams of environments once known.

“LA is a gritty place with pockets of intense beauty. I thrive in an environment like LA that is kind of syncopated with both beauty and gloom.”

In Dell (2025), Eric presents a woodland in which slender tree trunks emerge through layered fields of gray, rose, ochre, and muted green. Delicate oil-pastel lines flicker across the surface like branches, reflections, or half-remembered contours, while passages of color obscure any fixed sense of depth.

The painting evokes a secluded landscape recalled through sensation rather than precise observation. As forest forms appear and dissolve, Dell captures the instability of memory, transforming the natural world into an atmospheric space suspended between place, abstraction, and dream.

Eric continues to explore the unstable relationship between solid form, narrative, and abstraction. Through evolving combinations of acrylic, oil pastel, drawing, and layered color, he expands his dreamlike landscapes while deepening his engagement with memory, natural imagery, and the emotional contrasts of the places that have shaped him.

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