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Artist Information
Artist’s Statement
My subject is the woods. The chaos in this landscape attracts me because it encourages a variety of interpretations. Different seasons, the age of a forest, and changes of light inspire my response. Younger woods and earlier seasons bring about working with water. Older-growth forests and darker months encourage an excavation, down into the forest floor, the decay promising regeneration. Where water and earth meet is mud, which emerges from decay: I scrape off paint and add layers. The paintings always begin outdoors. Some resolve themselves before I leave the site, but most I finish in the studio.
Artist’s Bio
Barbara Hadden was born in 1955, in Hamburg, Germany, and spent her childhood in Europe and the Middle East. She studied painting, photography and filmmaking at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she received a diploma in 1977. She was awarded an Alumni Traveling Fellowship from that school in 1995 for her work in photography. Two years later, Hadden was a finalist in the Regional Fellowships for Visual Arts, awarded through the New England Foundation for the Arts. In 2002, she began to attend artist residency programs, which have deepened her commitment to landscape-based painting and photography.
Reviews
Art New England
August/September 2005
Regional Reviews
West Island Gallery
Barbara Hadden: Paintings and Photographs
Many of the twenty-four pieces in Barbara Hadden’s first solo exhibit at West Island Gallery draw on a residency last year at the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences, a 600 acres forested preserve in the northeastern corner of Georgia. Clearly the Boston-based painter and photographer was smitten with what she refers to as the “chaotic landscape,” a rich tangle of trees and blowdowns, underbrush and vines.
Oil, acrylic, and combination gouache-and-watercolor paintings in varying sizes, most of them from 2004-2005, conjure wooded interiors thick with tupelo, beech, poplar, and oak, and include a creek, pond, or mountain ridge here and there. The rendering is generally loose and abstract, transcending, as the artist notes, “the specifics of location.”
In Nantahala Wilderness, dark trunks alternate with irregular bands of light to represent the forest environment. The slender trees that form a kind of screen across the canvas in Poplar Grove cast diagonal shadows on the forest floor. Branches often cut or arc across the picture plane, as in Ramsey Creek and Hog Mountain II, breaking the overall verticality. Kangaroo Falls brings to mind the woods paintings of Lois Dodd, While Emmet Pond has the dynamism of Joellyn Duesberry’s monotype landscapes.
Seven selenium-toned silver print photographs are interspersed among the paintings. These photos fit nicely into the flow of the show, not only because they share subject matter - patches of untouched woodland – but also thanks to their abstract qualities, which Hadden sometimes accomplishes by varying focus from foreground to background.
A pair of Maine coast views in watercolor and gouache titled Casco Bay and View of Hope Island rounds out the display. Full of brilliant light, they, too, express a special sense of place.
-Carl Little |
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