 |
blog | about | contact Paintings: one | two | three | four |
From a June blog post, some notes & quotes while rereading The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (by Michael Kimmelman), which I'd preceded with Geoff Dyer's similarly thought-provoking book The Ongoing Moment. Each essay illuminates a different perspective of art's effects on everyday
life, its truths and its power to transcend the moment. Not only visually, but
in terms of things like exploration, adventure, collecting, survival,
artlessness, deliberation. Living life more alertly through deeper
understanding of all the ways art 'gets down in there', as I like to say. I've
been on board that train all my life, but I am always looking for new ideas and
reminders of why it's important, or as he puts it, its 'consolations'. The
final chapter, The Art of Gum-ball Machines, feels like a culmination of some
of my own thoughts on why I make art. For as long as I can remember, painting and drawing have, along with
writing, been my primary means of distilling my experience of the world. In
recent years, certain themes have emerged in my work. I found myself
attracted to objects and scenes like these after driving around upstate NY, and
walking or biking around New York City. In Beacon, where I have lived for over
four years, I continue to feel the connection between myself and this
history-rich once-industrial city-town nestled between the river and
the mountain, its steady integration of old and new having drawn me
from the city. I was familiarizing myself with Beacon around the same
time I was considering the anachronistic nature of both myself and my
work. As I was reconciling this mysterious sense of nostalgia with the
inescapable fact of living in the present, it instinctively felt like
a good match. I am interested in the objects within their environment, real or improvised, and in working on site in new places. I am not the first one to want to paint these things, but every observation's story can be taken literally or emotionally, depending on your own history. The work itself is figurative and not overly sentimental, yet with room to allow for narrative and context. Thiebaud painted cakes and gumball machines with obvious appreciation for their sensuous color and light, their formal arrangements. His work embodies American abundance, among other things, and its lush surfaces coax the eye. This is a bit of what I'm after. To this end I vary my application and treatment of paint. I feel like when I'm painting an old soda logo, I'm wistfully imagining walking into a classic dusty roadside store on a hot afternoon, digging into a cooler and pulling out the dripping bottle. I like the evocative power of words and images. Sometimes there's a more personal bent, as when I painted from a 1960 photo my dad had taken of his '55 Thunderbird in front of the house he'd just built, a small snapshot I'd found on his desk. The painting still elicits a flood of reminiscence when he looks at it, and it takes on greater meaning than whatever I'd imbued it with in my own observation; similar things happen when I show my work, in that people seem to connect, in the moment that they're looking. |
Erica Hauser is a 2002 graduate of the School of Visual Arts in NYC with a BFA in Illustration. She also studied at Cornell University and the Art Students League of New York. She grew up on a half-dirt road by a reservoir in Brewster, NY and currently lives in Beacon, drawn after 7 years in the city by the Hudson Valley's abundance of natural beauty, creative inspiration and sense of community. |
|||
from press releases: "Erica Hauser’s tightly orchestrated paintings evoke a sense of man’s relationship to water through the aged and often historic architectural elements she depicts. Through the use of simple strokes and stark detail, Hauser captures the complexities of surfaces and patinas to create the sense of realism and give the viewer an active sense of participation within her scenes." "Erica Hauser’s work is indelibly linked to travel in its various forms... [Her] precise handling of paint faithfully represents these textures and effects of light without overstating the subjects’ nostalgic associations. Her antiquarian imagery registers as consistently cool, tempered as it is by her documentarian’s sense of objectivity, and graciously allows the viewer to time-travel and fill in the backstory." |
||||
solo exhibitions: 2011: New Paintings, Concrete Gallery, Cold Spring, NY selected group exhibitions: 2010 projects/grants/other: Artist residencies: 2011 Recipient of an SOS grant from NYFA 2011
The 2011 Beacon Open Studios will be held Sept 25 and 26. My studio location to be determined. 2010, 2009 2010 2010, 2008, 2007 2008 2007 2002-ongoing |
||||
For information about purchasing or exhibiting a work, or commissions, please email the artist. Many works are also available as economically priced digital prints, and 'Beacon Dummy Light' is also available as a t-shirt. Inquiries are welcome. Please do not use images without permission. Thank you. |
