The Social Worker
When I read the obituary about Duncan Hannah in the "New York Times" it felt like a longtime companion had died. Not that I ever even met him. And not only because a truely well known painter left our planet. With Hannah simply the man who most likely chronicled who we wanted to be, what we all idolized about New York and the scene that ruled everything creative, was gone.
The boy from the mid-west who entered Manhattan in the early Seventies to attend Barton college and then Parson´s School Of Design was more interested in socializing than studying, trying out all kinds of creative output like acting and writing, surfing through an exciting nightlife, taking all kinds of available drugs in the company of Debbie Harry, Andy Warhol, Ana Sui or Brian Ferry, to name a few.
Keeping a diary from the very beginning allowed him to publish that wonderful book we all read: "20th Century Boy", describing his youth and our dreams. When I first came to New York almost ten years later than he did, it were those clubs we went and it was that downtown scene I would have loved to belong to.
Duncann Hannah is also one of the few heroes of my youth who survived , actually becoming a man willing to "turn his broken art into art". Getting sober and marrying a wonderful woman, living in Brooklyn and Connecticut, he started his carreer as a respected contemporary artist after humble beginnings as an illustrator for magazines.
I still dream of having one of his pictures on my wall - most favorable one of the Pengiun-Book-series.
But it is also fun reading his book again and have another look at his website for an uplift during boring afternoons.
www.duncanhannah.com
