Maggie Hasbrouck
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"These are the visions / from a summer of storms / abundance of rain / fallen trees / and laying down flowers..." | Maggie Hasbrouck artist
Maggie Hasbrouck has been living and working as an artist in Atlanta for almost thirty years. She began receiving major national acclaim in the early 1990s when her work was collected by celebrities including Elton John, John Mellencamp, Faith Hill, Jon Bon Jovi, and Courtney Cox, as well as a broad cross-section of collectors across the United States. Her work is the epitome of the intersection of classical beauty and contemporary concept. To this day, Maggie Hasbrouck remains one of the best-collected female artists in the South and a growing force on the national stage.
In her latest body of work, Hasbrouck returns to dramatic depictions of flowers – often single blooms – at the apex of their transformational beauty. The vibrancy and sensuality of these images is heightened by the artist’s recent incorporation of glass crystals into her technique. Hasbrouck melts these crystals over multiple layers of oil paint, dry pigment, and organic beeswax, resulting in a lustrous layer that enhances the mystery of the work.
Throughout the course of her career, Maggie’s technical ingenuity and imaginative subject matter have helped her gain recognition from collectors and critics alike. Maggie Hasbrouck and Bill Lowe share a similar vision for art – that the works strike a deep emotional chord within the viewer that lingers as a resonant and soulful presence long after initial viewing. Maggie’s paintings possess a deep emotionality that is achieved through a rich, dark picture plane illuminated by an enigmatic light source. The flowers seem to exist in a state of Grace, in-between reality and a dream-like state of transcendence.
artist statement
These are the visions
from a summer of storms
abundance of rain
fallen trees
and laying down flowers
from mornings of thunder
afternoon winds
and the mockingbird
out the window
carried off by the hawk
these are the visions
from a summer of storms
these musings of horses
of wishing to fly
from the wind in the sheets
caught up by the birds
small beasts in the night
and salt in the sky
these are the visions
from a summer of storms
the teasing of lightning
the promise of thunder
and the secrets of children
crowding my dreams
artist bio
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2017
"Reprieve: The Gospel of Beauty," Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2011
"Maggie Hasbrouck," Gallery One, Nashville, TN
"New Work by Maggie Hasbrouck" in conjunction with Orchid Daze, The Atlanta Botanical Gardens, Atlanta GA
2010
PULSE: SIGNS OF LIFE "Maggie Hasbrouck" Bill Lowe Gallery
2009
"Maggie Hasbrouck," Gallery One, Nashville, TN
2008
"Maggie Hasbrouck," Gallery One, Nashville, TN
2007
"Maggie Hasbrouck," The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2006
“Maggie Hasbrouck,” The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2004
“Maggie Hasbrouck,” The Lowe Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
2003
“Maggie Hasbrouck,” The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2002
“Maggie Hasbrouck,” The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1999
“Maggie Hasbrouck,” The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1997
“Maggie Hasbrouck,” The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1996
“Maggie Hasbrouck”, The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1995
"Pompeii," Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1994
Gallery 300, Galleria, Atlanta, GA
1992
"Solo Exhibition," Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1991
"Recent Works," South Eastern Center for the Arts, Atlanta, GA
1988
"New Work by Maggie Hasbrouck," Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2011
"Real Things" Mason Murer Fine Art, Atlanta GA
2009
"The Restoration," Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
2008
"19TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW AND GRAND OPENING OF NEW GALLERY" Bill Lowe Gallery, Atlanta GA
2007
"The Winter Exhibition," Robert Kidd Gallery, Birmingham, MI
2006
"The Body Sacred," Knoxville, TN
2002
13th Anniversary Show, The Lowe Gallery, Atlanta, GA
“Cultural Sensations: Pride Month,” The Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, GA
1994
"Works by Southern Women II," Fay Gold Gallery, Atlanta, GA
1991
"Faculty Show," Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA
1989
"Color Work," Gallery 3, Philadelphia, PA
"In Celebration of Women," Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL
1988
"Alternatives 88," Ohio University, Athens, OH
"Faculty Biennial Exhibition," Center for the Visual Arts, Normal, IL
"Faculty Artists of Illinois State University," Thornton Community College, South Holland, IL
1988
Artist's Show," The Gallery, Normal, IL
1987
"No TV," (Video Works,) Rochester Public Television, Rochester, NY "Art By Women," McKinley Foundation, Champaign, IL
PUBLICATIONS
2010 -Arnold, Taylor “Local Artist Maggie Hasbrouck,” The Piedmont Review, Autumn p.6
2010 -Hasbrouck, Maggie “Treasure, Twenty One paintings and a Key,” No Bones Studio
2008 - Haldeman, Peter “Dennis Quaid, A Rustic Los Angeles Sanctuary” Architectural Digest, November
2008 - Cover Art: "La Petit Voyeur" by Sonallah Ibrahim. Published by Actes Sud.
2008 - Cover Art: "Une Question de Jours" by Eric Nonn. Published by Actes Sud.
2004 - Peppers, Alison “Maggie Hasbrouck Lights Up the Room,” The Piedmont Review,
January 2004, p. 16.2003 - Byrd, Cathy “Tall Order,” Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles, November p. 46-48.1999- Lasoff, Melanie A. “Layers of Light,” Style, January/February 1999, p. 61-64.1997- Williams, Amanda Kyle. “Maggie Hasbrouck, It’s about communicating", Southern Voice, p. 23, 30, January 23.
1996 - Cullum Jerry “The Promise of Thunder and The Secrets of Children”: Notes on Maggie Hasbrouck’s newest paintings.
1996 - Locke, Donald. “Lowe Symbolism, Hasbrouck’s ‘expressive synthesis’”, Creative Loafing, 1996.1988 - "Exploring Color Photography," Robert Hirsch, Editor. William Brown Publishing.1986 - "Life Cycles," and "Ability To See".1984 - "Conceptions - Southwest," 1984 Issue, Albuquerque, NM
SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Dennis and Kimberly Quaid
Faith Hill
Elton John
Saks Fifth Avenue
Nordstrom's
Alston and Bird
Jon Bon Jovi
King and Spalding
Courtney Cox
The Phoenix
Long Aldridge & Norman
The Ponce
Project Open Hand
Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center
One Sugarloaf Center
The King Plow Arts Center
essay
MAGGIE HASBROUCK: SMALL MEMORIES , QUIET DREAMS
by Peter Frank
No doubt but that the crux of Maggie Hasbrouck’s art resides in the image. Not in the subject, not in the picture, and certainly not in the form, but in the image – the apparition of recognizable things in contexts that divorce them from extrinsic “meaning.” No landscape, interior, or other narrative embellishment contains the figures and objects maintaining at the core of Hasbrouck’s painting/photographs. (The artworks are sourced in photographs, but are scaled and textured as paintings.) The girls and boys and animals, the devices and furnishings hovering in what seems to be an old-master gloom, seem whole light years and mindsets removed from environments or backgrounds that would force us to read them a particular way. Indeed, the luminous, even immanent murk enveloping these beings so unmoors them from conventional pictoriality as to permit each of us a grand, even vertigo-inducing breadth of interpretation. Here, viewers are not simply invited to “know” the work according to their own experiences, but have responsibility for knowing the work fairly foisted on them.
Hasbrouck sets in motion a chain reaction of subjective response. She chooses the protagonists, and disposes them in each work, according to what must be arbitrary decisions – decisions informed by a clearly coherent personal symbology, but designed, if anything, to protect that symbology from quick decipherment. The recurrence of particular things – birdcages, for example, wielded by a number of the human figures in the most recent works – prompts one’s attention: they are clues to a meaning, to a narrative thread, at the very least to a system of motifs, and motives, that might contain Hasbrouck’s message. But the message, finally, is not borne by these props, or even by the gestures of the people wielding them; indeed, it is not conveyed even by more persistent factors, such as the youth of those people (few, if any, have reached puberty). Hasbrouck’s message, however much it may be informed by such factors – they are not negligible, and clearly they are not just formal conceits – concerns the condition(s) of human perception, of memory and imagination and the elaborate way the mind both generates and comprehends images.
Although materially based in photography, the works do not relate to each other as if, say, adjacent in a scrapbook. They elide the narrative conventions of both “high” photography (e.g. the monographic sequences that brought photographers such as Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander to prominence) and “low” (the more and more ubiquitous fotonovela). Still, their similarly ordered contents and compositions insist on a linkage, one that seems to take us deeper than the formal continuity of a “body of work.” These panels seem to want to convey a story, but their drama is buried behind the images, as if contained in the backlighting. As in the theater of Robert Wilson, the tableau rather than the scene is the unit of information here; we come away from these stark, incandescent apparitions as if they are the remains, the souvenirs, of dreams.
Perhaps we can say that Hasbrouck has taken the elements of an odd novel and made poems out of them. Events do not happen; they are not happening; they have not happened. Events simply exist, as detached from the flow of time, as ever-present as matter. We can project teleologies on these tableaux, much as we look at snapshots and try to imagine the things the people in the shots did before and after. But, having set in motion our process of close reading, Hasbrouck’s images resist being read closely. They stand entirely out of time; they are not even in the present. Rather, they occupy a plane of perceived time that curves around and through ours, sometimes parallel, sometimes perpendicular, sometimes diagonal, sometimes not at all straight. This fluid plane is the dimension of dream.
Not dreams, dream – a hypnagogic state of cognition that denies the tyranny of time by denying time itself. While some sort of causal relationship suggests itself constantly in the interaction between child and prop, the relationship does not seem occasioned by any logical sequence of events. However vivid the boy’s or girl’s presence may be, however palpable the stool or hat or bird may seem, their suspension in a realm as bottomless and depthless as outer space itself suppresses their narrative coherency, not to mention their physical location. They are ghosts of themselves, haunting an eternal now.
Of course, where children appear, the psychological dimension inevitably foregrounds itself. The picture of a child can never stand apart from its ramifications. However fraught with ancient cultural baggage or even the burdens of the collective unconscious, a man-made object can remain an object, an animal can remain an animal, a plant a plant. (Hasbrouck as much as insists on this with her vast renditions of single flowers set adrift in her characteristic dark aether; no matter how they float and glow, these large blooms resist our psychological projections.) But, as every one of us has been a child – and every one of us has been shaped crucially by our childhood – the presence of children invariably inspires strong sensations, irresistible associations. Hasbrouck’s underage cohort does not serve to “put you in the picture” so much as to put the picture in you, to narrow (if not collapse) the emotional distance between you and the moment you see.
Is that manipulation on Hasbrouck’s part? Not at all – or perhaps we should say, of course, art that moves us manipulates us. But Hasbrouck does not put children in her pictures simply in order to make them more effective (much less more sentimental). Rather, she conceives the pictures around these children. They are the pictures’ raison d’être, their focal point, the nucleus of whatever they are saying and/or getting us to say to ourselves. If they are about memory, they are about childhood memory – which is essentially the same thing: the most important thing we learn as kids is how to remember (or at least that we live – and succeed and fail – through recollection). These tableaux are manifestations of remembrance – less of specific things remembered than of the mechanism(s) of memory. Sometimes they even seem like mnemonic devices, rebuses designed to help us recall specifics. But, however much nature may abhor a vacuum, Hasbrouck relishes it, and in that generous space she allows the specifics to dissipate off the figure or the furniture into the inexactitude of the surrounding gloom.
Good pictures, like good stories, tell you a good deal about their authors. Really good works of art, however, tell you a good deal more about their viewers, beginning (or is it ending?) with you. Maggie Hasbrouck’s recent paintings are nothing if not windows on the soul. But is it her soul you’re gazing into? That is, is it only her soul?
essay
“The Promise of Thunder and the Secrets of Children”: Notes on Maggie Hasbrouck’s Newest Paintings
by Jerry Cullum
Maggie Hasbrouck’s work is about dream, desire, innocence, spirituality and the body. That may seem like a grandiose territory to claim for paintings that appear to evoke children’s games and fantasy. Her imagery stirs the imagination comfortably, or not so comfortably, whatever discomfort we might feel inevitably raises issues of innocence and knowledge or lack and wish and dream and the gulfs in between.
Hasbrouck is sidestepping the world of literal reality and taking the viewer quickly into realms of imagination that belong not to the adult viewers but to the children in the pictures. She is a mother and her daughter appears in many of the photographs that underlie these paintings.
Hasbrouck’s children often wear animal masks. We may be reminded of Egyptian and Roman wall paintings, scenes in which nakedness signified the stripping away of illusion and the masks symbolized the direct animal forces of emotion or the accumulation of the personal powers imaged forth in the creature whose head replaced the human cranium.
Or we may just be reminded of children’s made up games of the moment. As a mother, Hasbrouck knows from her own experience as well as her own memory just how secret and creative the world of the sensitive child is. The child’s imagination really does construct its own private rituals and its own private equivalents to ancient religions. A little introspection may be needed to call this forth. We forget because it was a longtime ago. And children learn early not to be too forthcoming with their fantasies in a world that denigrates the place of imagination.
It is of tremendous significance that Hasbrouck begins her painting practice with a period of meditation. It is also of significance that she teaches Sunday School at a Quaker meeting. “If thee does not turn to the inner Light, where will thee turn?”, is an ancient insight that long predates George Fox and the rebirth of inwardness that gave rise to Quaker Spirituality. In the traditions that have been persecuted by fundamentalists opponents in all generations, spirit and body are in opposition but also a continuum. What begins in the lowest, crudest biological forces terminates in the highest forms of ethical and spiritual commitment through direct experience. Just as psychoanalysis teaches, the impulses grounded in bodily survival provide the driving energy for personal capacities intuited only in dreams. The traditions differ from Freud only in the assertion that the capacities are real.
……..
Eventually it all feeds into our intuitions from or projections onto nature, depending on your own intellectual perspective. Rumi writes that we died as plants to become animals and this memory is retained only in our affection for flowers and springtime. We do not have to follow the Persian Mystic’s logic of dying to animal to become human and dying to self to become angel and more than angel to appreciate the dimensions of Hasbrouck’s flower paintings. We could also read them as sensually compelling or downright sexy. They are certainly as open and inviting a vision as one could possibly wish. Their visionary quietude is a contrast and yet a continuation of the paintings of children. We tend to read all human beings in the light of our own inwardness and Hasbrouck’s “visions from a summer of storms”, as her poetic artist’s statement puts it, are simultaneously dark and sunny,