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My recent paintings explore a range of imagery from my imagination that is partly drawn from memory yet grounded in the experience of nature as it is pushed to extremes. The result sits resolutely in the fertile border between landscape and abstraction.
I spent a lot of time as a child in the East End of Long Island surrounded by open farmland. The empty farm field sits in my mind as a place like the space in the painting; the painting becomes a field where I can grow strange natural forms that suggest trees or weather. The term dream logic feels apt where there are elements, forms or light that feel familiar to the viewer, but things verge on the surreal. I aim for a degree of ambiguity that resists easy naming. My paintings often embody a kind of euphoria, yet I am at once celebrating the beauty of the natural world while we still have it and expressing melancholy at its destruction in our hands.
I want people to see the paint in front of them as opposed to an illusion that feels set and closed. Openness and mutability are also how imagery appears in memory, where things aren’t fixed and bordered, and I have honed a language that reflects this fluidity and playfulness. My fears about the perilous climate seep in to inform the work but are not broadcast in obvious ways. The paintings combine investigative lines and floods of color to create imaginary landscapes that suggest nature off kilter.
I start from ink and watercolor drawings that I approach like a stream of consciousness writing exercise. When I make the drawings, I am thinking as much about how the lines narrate the picture as I am about evoking the light and atmosphere of a specific environment. I create images in the space of the picture rather than attempting realism. Because I work with continuous line making in the drawings, the resulting language verges on cartoon-like, with a plasticity that has been called “as if Milton Avery painted the background of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.”
I work from a hovering, aerial vantage point, picturing the paper as an empty field where I can draw in the dirt with lines that move around the field and then start upwards towards an area that is like a sky, scooping volumes of air with a looping line. I then make small scale oil paintings that attempt to capture the freshness and immediacy of the watercolors, and the way unexpected, unnamable colors flow into each other. I remain open to the ways oil paint is different and change things as I go. From these smaller works, I select some to create larger paintings. I do this all freehand, so each size has different challenges to overcome, and showing some of that struggle is important to me. I want to arrive at a place that is hard won and alive.
Hazan was born and raised in New York City and attended Bryn Mawr College and the New York Studio School. She was awarded a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, has twice been a resident of Yaddo and received a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Recent solo shows include Under the Sun, HESSE FLATOW, NY; Sundown, Madoo Conservancy, Sagaponack, NY; High Noon, Duck Creek Art Center, Springs, NY; Body to Land, (two person) Turn Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Recent group shows include Even in Arcadia There I Am at HESSE FLATOW, NY; Blue Hour at Phillips, NY; Mercury Rising, at Bookstein Projects, NY: Trodden Path; HESSE FLATOW East, Amagansett NY; Psychedelic Landscape, Eric Firestone Gallery, NY; and Heat Wave, Johannes Vogt Gallery, NY. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Forbes, Two Coats of Paint, Art Critical, The Brooklyn Rail and The Art Newspaper. She serves as the founder and director of Platform Project Space in Brooklyn, NY.
