Erica Hauser is a painter based in Beacon, NY. She grew up in Brewster, NY and after being in New York City for years, has lived in the Hudson Valley since 2007, from Beacon to Newburgh and back again. She holds a BFA in illustration from School of Visual Arts, a long-ago experience that quietly informs her fine art practice.

As well as making paintings, she creates public art installations, indoor murals, commissions, design, and custom prints. In 2011 she received a NYFA grant and attended artist residencies in New Mexico (2011), Vermont (2012) and upstate NY (2011, 2012).
In 2022 she received an Awesome Newburgh grant to develop a local project, and an individual NYSCA Statewide Regrant. From 2013-2020 she owned and ran Catalyst Gallery in Beacon, coordinating shows and events.

2023-25 solo exhibitions include Robin Rice Gallery in Hudson, NY; Canvas & Clothier Poughkeepsie; Artyard Kingston; and  Beacon's Howland Library. During spring and early summer 2026 her work is on view at Big Mouth Coffee, at Industrial Arts in Beacon and C+C Hudson. 

STATEMENT

My paintings employ my lifelong love for color and composition, where I interpret the play of pattern and organic shapes on a surface, with vibrant and earthy tone variations. I seek an effect of depth and calm, yet also a humor and playfulness in the way stripes roll and curve and flutter, or how those soft rounds and lines just nudge against one another. 
There’s the pleasure of layering smooth broad expanses of paint on canvas or panel or paper. Color ideas come by way of vintage materials like old toys and photographs, textiles, retired crayons or sun-faded signage. I might mix paints to evoke a season or a place, a landscape or an amusement park. Titles are drawn from lyrics, moods, nature, and pigments to suggest the range of feelings and associations that colors hold.
I grew up working for my father’s firewood business, eventually realizing that my longtime seasonal job as a firewood stacker informs my art, just as the painting might guide my intuition when I’m arranging split wood in precise stacks for customers. In my stack paintings, I hand-draw and paint oblong shapes, fitting them together into a balanced pile on the canvas. For dimensional works I assemble painted cut wood pieces. In most, the forms are nearly free-floating but anchored together in space at one or two points, depending on each other for stability. 
It became evident, too, that the organizational quality of the patterns, as well as my handling of paint and hard-edged painting methods recall other past jobs rolling chocolate truffles, decorating cookies, and lettering ceramics. When I repeat compositions, I consider them meditations of a sort, in the way a practiced and familiar movement creates space in the mind and body to explore something new​.