David Hanes (b. 1987) is a "self-taught" painter of Canadian and American roots who redirected himself toward a more nature-rooted painting practice after several years of digital, conceptual, and minimal artmaking. Based in Berlin since 2014, he spends a significant amount of his time traversing the globe, which informs his painting practise.

Perhaps best described as nomadic, artworks start from plein-air sketches, which journey with him during his travels to later serve as the ideal "Momentaufnahme" (German for "snapshots"), eventually ending up in a new country with totally different circumstances before becoming oil paintings or watercolors. After his time on the road, Hanes settles into a studio or residency to contemplate the collected studies as "souvenirs" or "conduits" to his felt experiences and emotions before he begins painting. A sketched moment from Iceland may turn into a watercolor in Italy and, finally, an oil-painted canvas in Berlin. This puts time and distance between the moment of the sketch and the final canvas, adding a non-observed layer made only by memory and feeling.

Recalling the work of Matisse, Kandinsky, Gauguin, Kirchner, and other early modern painters, he strives to capture the immediate feelings, energies, and emotions of each moment as he experiences them. Later, in the studio, he revisits the emotions tied to his plein-air studies, aiming to create dynamic windows into the living experiences of his worldly travels. Centered around subjects of nature, these paintings use color to explore the ideas and emotions he experiences, resulting in rawly expressive works that reveal not only the energetics of his encounters but also the nakedness of the canvas and the mark-making processes through which they are created.

In the most personal sense, the purpose of artmaking is to offer a kind of relief or response to suffering, and that art can sustain deep currents of an ever-temporal, yet interconnected universe. Hanes often uses the language of metaphysical concepts to convey a deeply felt connection with the currents of life — driving his exploration into an Earth-driven painting practice, nurturing a holistic, human perspective in an ever-technologically robust and uncertain society.