I’m Aedan A. Hanley, a contemporary abstract expressionist painter based in Mission Viejo. I was raised with the belief that painting isn’t decoration—it’s a way of thinking. My late mother, an artist herself, taught me early that color can carry frustration, tenderness, insecurity, and joy when words fall short.

My work explores how emotion behaves inside a body and inside a space—how we hold tension, how we release it, how we learn to live inside contradiction. I build surfaces the way memory builds meaning: in fragments, revisions, and returns—layering acrylic and oil with ink, pen, and oil stick until the painting holds its own internal gravity.

Some paintings lean toward non-objective abstraction; others pull from landscape or gesture. At times, I create work that honors under-recognized women of abstract expressionism from the 1950s and ’60s, and I often weave Queer abstraction into the language of color and form.

Sustainability is part of my practice. I frequently upcycle discarded or donated gallery-wrapped canvases—letting a previous painting’s “ghost layer” become the foundation for something new. It’s my way of making beauty while reducing waste, and of proving that renewal can be part of the story. I also work on new heavy duty gallery-wrapped canvases. But there's something fun about the "discovery" of something old and discarded becoming something new and engaging.

Ultimately, I want the work to reward attention. The longer you live with it, the more it reveals—shifts in temperature, hidden edges, unexpected calm. My goal is simple: for the painting to change the room, and for the room to change you.