“The magic moment is to finish a piece
and like what you see,” says Josephine
Haden, whose work will be on view at the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts beginning
June 5 in an exhibition titled
Stranger Than Paradise.
Haden lives in Arlington, Va., and
was the winner of a 2009 VMFA
Fellowship. Her paintings are included
in public and private collections in the
U.S. and France, including the Clinton
Presidential Library and Museum in
Little Rock, Ark.
The exhibition will be on view in
VMFA’s Pauley Center through Sep 13,
2009.
“Starting with landscapes, I found
myself creating mysterious and distant
places that hovered on the edge of
reality,” Haden says. “Filling the
canvas with lush vegetation and dense
forests, I played with scale and space
while relying on a base ground of
gestural abstraction.”
She calls her latest series of works
“Globalization,” meaning that everything
is fair game when she composes a
painting, and says she “beams them in”
from some other place, from some other
story or scene.
“My intention is to create delight
and intrigue.”
Critic Donald Kuspit calls Haden an
“eloquent” painter and a realist of
sorts. “I say ‘of sorts’ because there’s
an aura of eeriness to her reality,
however precisely (always precisely)
rendered—but her images are also
abstract, which no doubt adds to their
uncanniness.” Kuspit is the
distinguished professor of art history
and philosophy at the State University
of New York at Stony Brook and professor
of art history at the School of Visual
Arts in Manhattan.
Earth, sky and water dominate her
vast, open landscapes that are populated
with evocative figures and objects from
contemporary culture—a young girl riding
a rubber ball as peacocks strut nearby,
children around a campfire as white
horses frolic in the distance, a child
on a beach with an elaborate sand
castle, or a boy with lizards beside a
swimming pool.
Haden studied art and art history as
an undergraduate at Georgetown
University and earned a master’s degree
in art history from George Washington
University. Both schools are in the
District of Columbia.
