Kaye Hanna’s moody and delicate paintings offer us layers of washes of color. Hanna incorporates text in the form of calligraphy into her works. This text is often partially hidden or obscured, evoking old manuscripts with sections of blurred text caused by water damage, fading or rubbing. Hanna’s watermarked canvases offer up a quiet space for contemplation and prayer. She makes reference to her relationship with God in these works that have names like Quality of Mercy and Embryonic. Hanna’s continued fascination with the evidence of life is demonstrated in her paintings by the use of an abstracted symbolic language that hints at fossils, shells and the markings of pre-historic man. This abstracted documentation produces images that feel like the pages of an abstract organic bible. Hanna suggests that her Lebanese ancestry gave her the love for the calligraphic mark as seen in the beauty of written Arabic. She loves to “make beautiful letters” and the scriptures of the Bible inspire her work. Hanna is as much in the tradition of the ancient scribes or medieval monks in her desire to preserve and communicate her understanding of “the word of God” through the written and painted medium. She intentionally obscures her work though, and this in itself lends to the work the air of a naturally occurring phenomenon. Hanna has exhibited widely throughout Florida and received numerous calligraphy project commissions.

“In Jamaica when we would drive back into town from the country we would go through Fern Gully. Slowly, carefully, for two miles, we would drive through, sometimes stopping to stamp silver-back ferns on our hands. It was treacherous to drive that way because the roads were damp and slick and the rocks jutted out, but there was no other choice, and it really was a beautiful sight – gorgeous ferns. It was like being in a  rainforest. Cars had to use their head-lights in order to see because it was so dark, and yet when you came out on the other side, the sun would be so bright it would almost blind you. About halfway through there was an opening to the sky (still there and made larger) where one could buy souvenirs.”