Hannah Pearlman is making art that feels authentic

If you’ve been in the lower lobby of the Dwares Jewish Community Center, have a child who attends the Jewish Community Day School of Rhode Island or have visited the youth lounge at Temple Emanu-El, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the bold, colorful murals painted by Hannah Pearlman, 39, an artist and Providence native.

While she’s been an artist since she was a kid, it wasn’t always clear to Pearlman that she could make a living as one. After a varied career in Jewish nonprofits, many moves, having her son, and a getting through a pandemic, Pearlman decided to go for it.

Pearlman’s style is vibrant and distinctive, but she didn’t always draw that way. “For a long time, I felt like I didn't have any style. I would kind of just be like, I'm going to try this thing, I'm going to try that thing,” she explained in a recent interview. “Experimenting is still, I think, really important.”

Though she read many books on how to develop her style and find her voice, in the end it was a mentor who helped her on the path to her current aesthetic. “I had this mentor who was like, ‘forget all that . . . you’re a designer, you’re going to design it.”

Pearlman did this by picking a limited color palette, specific textures, shapes and lines. She made herself a brand book and told herself, “You're gonna stick with this for six months, and just do this for six months. And that was kind of eye-opening.”

Much of the advice on breaking into the commercial art industry is about having a signature style that stands out. “If someone is going to hire you, they want to know what they’re going to get,” Pearlman explained. Finding her style turned out to be less a search and more a creative process.

Pearlman grew up a few blocks from where she now lives on the East Side of Providence in a family with roots in the area that go back generations. An art lover from a young age, she took art classes at the RISD Museum back before its expansion in the early 2000s and was allowed to wander the museum. Pearlman spent many years away, first in Montreal for college followed by stints in Boston, Denver and Seattle.

As a young person, she attended Temple Emanu-El in Providence, and was in a Shabbat group that would go from house to house and celebrate all the holidays together. “You know, the funny thing is, growing up here, I think that, everywhere else I went, I was always trying to find this in other places,” she said.

While she studied religion as an undergraduate at McGill University, it was her time at Brandeis University studying Jewish Professional Leadership that led to her first career working for Jewish nonprofits. “I had one year of working after college before I went to grad school,” Pearlman said, “and I worked at a Hillel in Houston.”

This led to her interest in how the organization ran. “I started thinking, okay, maybe this is a way I could apply religious studies stuff to my own community.”

After graduate school Pearlman worked in fundraising at a synagogue, at an organization that taught community organizing and for Jewish music pioneer Rick Recht.

“I really liked working for him,” she said, “but at the same time I had this side hustle. I was learning calligraphy and at a certain point people started hiring me to do it.” She was doing wedding signage, place cards and envelopes when someone asked her to design a logo. “I was like, I don't actually know how to do that!” So, she took a class and, while in Seattle, went back to school for graphic design.

After a move back to Providence during the pandemic (“Turns out being a parent in isolation is really hard!”), Pearlman spent some time refining and figuring out her business. She moved away from graphic design and has transitioned to murals, illustration and some art licensing.

The first mural was in her own bedroom, painted with the help of her husband. “I don’t think it was fun for him,” Pearlman laughed admitting to being a bit of a control freak. “But it was cool!”

When they moved to Providence and bought their current house, she began painting murals on the walls. A whitewashed brick wall around the fireplace with a stain on it became a graphic mural of the ocean and sun. Another room has oranges painted on the walls.

“I kind of just started painting around the house . . . and they're just, kind of all over,” she said. “Then as I was trying to figure out what my art business was going to be, I realized that actually murals are kind of more lucrative. It's really hard work, but it's kind of like a big chunk all at once.”

Another benefit to doing mural work is being around other people. “I've done a couple of schools and . . . one camp, at the end of the day, I just like being there and talking to people,” Pearlman said. “It's great. It's really fun.”

People will come up to her with questions, especially in school settings, which she loves. “The kids come up, and they're like, how did you get the picture so big? How do you do the line so straight? Why do you have a brush that looks like a triangle? Like, what's this? What's that?”

Pearlman’s inspiration for her work comes from everywhere. “I take pictures of lots of things . . . like we went blueberry picking and I took pictures of the blueberry bushes because they look really cool.” She finds inspiration in botanicals and florals in addition to vintage packaging and lettering. “I have a lot of reference books on typefaces . . . people used to be so much more expressive with typography,” she said.

She credits her husband with her love of puns, which frequently show up in her work and greeting cards. “I think it's all his fault!” she said with a laugh, “There's just something about it that I feel is relatable. It’s also a little whimsical, it's funny, but also it can express something authentically.”

Her stationery business was a natural extension of her art practice. “Over the years I just made so much art that like really lent itself to greeting cards,” she explained. “I love paper, and stationery and pens, and also just in terms of storing it in my house it was more doable.”

Creating artwork for a larger commercial market also means getting creative in certain categories to keep the work authentic. “I got some advice from an agent earlier this year, who was like, the number one selling category in commercial art is Christmas. And I was like, how am I going to do this? I really don't think that I can make myself draw Santa,” Pearlman said.

“How do you walk the line between being true to yourself, your style, your own history and your beliefs, and also making stuff that is, like, commercially accessible for lots of products and lots of different people,” she said. “It feels like showing up as a Jewish person and making stuff that is relevant to me, and maybe for a small community . . . it feels more authentic to me, and it feels important.”

SARAH GREENLEAF (sgreenleaf@jewishallianceri.org) is the digital marketing specialist for the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island and writes for Jewish Rhode Island.