Hannah Celeste Garrison is a visual artist and nature lover from San Antonio, Texas. She graduated in 2014 from the University of Texas at San Antonio with her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art. In the beginning of her artistic career, realism and technical prowess where at the forefront of her artistic endeavors. However, her drive for perfection also drove her away from painting. While studying other artistic disciplines, she rekindled her love for paint as a visual color field. She is continuously fascinated by color and its interaction with light. When she works, she is constantly looking for ways to reconcile her love for the abstract and formal elements of paint with her impulse to draw with more technical skill.
Hiking is essential to her mental well-being, but she doesn't often get that chance. So she looks around at all the nature that surrounds - even in those mundane places such as parking lots and sidewalks, nature will always find a way to peep through. So she collects and paints abstractions of these collections in the hopes that she can inspire someone to see what she sees in them.
She paints small found, organic objects in order to showcase the natural beauty in these things that are otherwise tossed and discarded. These objects - often rocks and small pieces of wood are all around us. We pass them by on the way to our cars. We rake them and toss them when the leaves start to fall and messy our yards. Hannah brings them to life by enlarging them and filling them with color - to show that they are just as important to human life as they are to human creativity. She collects and paints abstractions of these objects in the hopes that she can inspire someone to see what she sees in them.
Hannah was also diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the summer of 2017. She currently volunteers as a self-help group leader for the National MS Society of San Antonio once per month.
Hannah Celeste Garrison is also an Artist-In-Residence for a San Antonio-based non profit organization, Hearts Need Art, that works to bring the arts to patients facing life-altering health challenges. Her time is spent with patients at the Outpatient setting and Inpatient settings at a local hospital. She works to design, implement, and engage with patients with collaborative arts projects, group art projects, window painting, live art demonstrations, and patient bedside activities.