At the age of 14, after moving around the state a lot with the family, Steve Hanson landed in Santa Barbara, a first-year at Santa Barbara High School who liked to draw and surf. When he graduated in 1978, he accepted the senior-class art award with a smile and wasted little time diving deeper into his talents. Focusing on painting, he took art classes at Santa Barbara City College. He also turned pro as a competitive surfer, sponsored by the venerable Channel Islands Surfboards.
“I had some success in the water,” Hanson remembers of his three-year stint in the professional ranks. But he also considered a longer view of his life down the line. By 1987, he had graduated from the California Institute of the Arts, near Los Angeles. Back in Santa Barbara, he got a job working for Don and Dave Harris, landscape installers who worked for designer Ray Sodomka at the Turk Hessellund full-service nursery on Coast Village Road in Montecito. “I learned a lot from those guys,” Hanson said, adding that he enjoyed the heavy lifting of landscaping work. “I liked digging and getting my hands dirty.”
At the same time, Hanson was showing — and selling — his art through his connections to the Los Angeles art scene. Soon enough, a sensible path played out before him, leading him to UCSB to secure an advanced degree in fine arts. “My goal was to teach art at the university level and keep painting,” he said. “It seemed like the perfect combination,” he added, and a career track not uncommon for many dedicated working artists. Life had other plans, however.