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Josephine
Haden uses plenty of soft, misty colors in her acrylic-on-wood paintings
. . . But her stuff
cuts through the blur . . . [with] more emotional
force. Each consists of iconic images and small vignettes that
show various stages of a woman's life from childhood through old
age. It isn't clear whether the paintings are autobiographical.
The scenes are scattered about the picture plane and backed by a
misty landscape. But they aren't warm, fuzzy paintings.
There's an ominous undertone. A Volvo station wagon, the preferred
transport of the eco-conscious among Washington's upper middle class,
sits by itself in It Hurts #1. The rear hatch is wide open, like
the gaping maw of some giant trap designed to capture rather than
kill. Suburbia as a life sentence? Soccer moms in
Hell? Who knows?
Ferdinand Protzman,
art critic, author, and Contributing Editor for
Artnews
magazine
Nobody's Real, acrylic on canvas
22.5" x 26" (57 cm. x 64 cm.)
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