Welcome to HannaTess ArtHaus
By Maria Kelebeev
I feel deeply at home in creative spaces. I am at home in the quiet of a studio, the focus of a gallery, on stage speaking, in a classroom teaching, and out in the field being fully present. HannaTess ArtHaus did not grow out of a feeling of being displaced; it developed because those walls needed to expand. I wanted to take that visceral sense of creative belonging and make it larger.
Because my life and practice move across borders—carrying the light of Venice, the history of Vienna, the energy of New York and Paris, and the grounding rhythm of my home in Canada—I needed a way for that feeling of home to travel with me. HannaTess is simply the name of this practice: a mobile incubator of expression and thought that moves wherever I go.
When you visit this digital archive, I want you to feel as though you are truly stepping through the studio door. You are invited to pull up a chair and become a part of the daily realities here—the messy experiments, the quiet insights, and the ongoing conversations that shape the work.
My Journey & Practice
My path has wound through business, marketing, fine arts, and graphic design. Rather than keeping these worlds separate, I let them fold into one another to help me understand how we communicate what is internal and unseen.
I don’t look at myself as a formal researcher, but I have a deeply curious and experimental mind. I am endlessly fascinated by the gap between what we actually look at and what we assume is there. My personal art practice—focused on contemporary emotional paintings of figures, landscapes, and body work—is my way of mapping that gap, capturing how memory clings to physical places and how our internal states live inside our bodies. Everything created under the ArtHaus umbrella is an attempt to look past conditional validation and look at the raw construction of meaning.
An Invitation to Collaborate
Creativity requires moments of solitude, but meaning itself is fundamentally relational—it comes alive in the spaces between us.
Because of that, I am glad to lead and walk alongside anyone who shares this same curiosity. When I teach a life drawing class, lead a workshop, or speak to a room, I am not lecturing from a distance. I am sharing the field notes of my own experiments and inviting you to test them against your own perception.
Consider this site an open door to the incubator. You are welcome to browse the gallery, read through the evolving essays, or join us for a workshop. I am glad you are here to share in the thoughts, the questions, and the beautiful instability of making art.
— Maria Kelebeev
