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Artists Registry
Bronx NY United States
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Artist's Statement
Statement of Work
I have to admit, I am a product of the urban environment.
As a child raised in New York, I was constantly confronted by the physical geometry of the city, with all its order and disorder. When I looked out my window I saw other buildings just like mine, buildings encased in even rows of bricks, punctuated by windows, doors and fire escapes, and fringed on top with the haphazard intersecting patterns of antennae and chimneys. As the sun moved overhead, I watched the shadows and the bright areas move, revealing new shapes of light and dark, new depths to the dimensions of buildings and train trestles. The city, for me, was full of wonder and mystery, planned yet chaotic.
This is the source of my aesthetic, and in all my work I seek to discover and maintain an underlying structural foundation. In my cityscapes I attempt to find some method to the urban ‘madness’, and in landscapes I try to capture the unifying pattern that is inherent in nature’s randomness.
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Born and raised in the Bronx, Daniel Hauben is acclaimed as the borough’s most versatile and prolific painter. Working in both oil paint and chalk pastel, he has spent 25 years capturing the life of the Bronx on canvas or paper, setting up his easel en plein air on street corners and overpasses, under elevated subway trains or in playgrounds. “I’m a landscape painter,” he says. “It just so happens that the landscape I paint is most often the Bronx.”
His work captures the play of light and shadow in the urban environment: the patterns cast on the street by the elevated train trestles, the windows of apartment buildings gilded at sunset, the sharp white heat of a sidewalk in high summer, or the deeply shadowed canyons between tall buildings in late autumn afternoons.
An avid traveler, Hauben has journeyed far afield, carrying his painting supplies and easel with him. “There is no better way to learn about a new place than to set up your easel on a corner and paint the life that revolves around you,” he says. Hauben has painted in Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, France, Southern India and Costa Rica, as well as New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia and California.
The Studio Pieces
In addition to painting en plein air, Hauben spends many hours in his Riverdale studio, creating larger, often more imaginative pieces. He has experimented with low relief works in plaster, glass and bronze, in addition to continuing to produce his signature oil relief paintings.
The Art of Light
From the warm glow of an autumnal Virginia dusk captured in delicate pastel, to the bright afternoon light glancing off tall city buildings, to the gritty layers of textured oil paint carved out to portray shadowed, crumbling urban structures, Hauben is able to capture and express light as a life force. His art brings home to us what it means to live in this world – in both a natural and an urban environment – and it reminds us that there is beauty and fragility in both.
EDUCATION
School of Visual Arts, New York, NY (B.F.A., 1983)
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (1977-78 )
SELECTED ART INSTRUCTION
City College of NY: School of Architecture, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture (2003-present)
Art Students League, NYC (2003)
Pastel Society of America (2003)
Beverly Street Studio School (2003)
City University of New York Graduate Center (2000, 2001)
AWARDS, RESIDENCIES & COMMISSIONS
Residency – Julia & David White Artist's Colony, Costa Rica 2004
Commission – MTA Arts for Transit 2002-2005
Residency – Weir Farm Trust, Wilton, CT 2002,01
Residency – Djerassi Artist's Colony, Woodside, CA 2000
Residency – Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, VA 2003, 01, 00, 98, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 91, 88
Residency – Villa Montalvo Artist's Colony, Saratoga, CA 1999
B.R.I.O. Excellence in the Arts Award, Bronx Council on the Arts 2003, 99, 97, 95, 93, 91, 89
Residency -- Fundación Valparaíso, Almeria, Spain 1997
Commission -- New York Botanical Garden, Family Garden Mural 1995
Commission -- CitiArts/New York Botanical Gardens Mural Project 1994
Scholarship -- New York Pastel Society 1992
Residency -- Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Fronberg, Germany 1990
Louis Lozowick Award for Graphics 1989
Certificate of Excellence, Communication Arts Magazine 1988
COLLECTIONS
Henry Luce Jr. New York Historical Society Pfizer, Inc.
Museum of the City of NY Merrill Lynch Bankers Trust
Krasdale Foods Inc. Harvard University Loews Corp.
Chemical Bank Goldman/Sachs Shearson Lehman Bros.
Pepsico NYNEX Montefiore Medical Group
E.F. Hutton Mutual Life Insurance Reavis/McGrath
Zimmerli Art Museum Banco Popular New School for Social Research
Villa Haiss Museum, Germany