Reviews

". . . Josephine Haden uses plenty of soft, misty colors in her acrylic-on-wood paintings titled, respectively, It Hurts #1 and It Hurts #2. 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 in The Washington Post, July 13, 2000

"On Josephine Haden. The work is strange. I like the spacial issues. I like the very close detail and the linear movement of the yellow flowers that jumps back and forth. Zoom. I like the incommensurate space. This is a paradise lost or some place not fully available."

Donald Kuspit in a Lecture at the Arlington Arts Center, January 22, 1994




"Worlds in Collision. In Josephine Haden's new paintings . . . the artist turns a magnifying glass on the countless random connections and unseen magnetic forces beneath the surface order of the universe. Strong vertical and arching lines or repeated, short horizontal or diagonal lines energize her canvases. In Choices (1988), for example, thin reed-like strokes of royal blue, turquoise, white and pink madly intersect to create a dense thicket, out of which two flower and grass covered paths diverge . . . As Haden says, these are places we cannot see, because they don't exist. Yet they seem unquestionably familiar, like the shards of yellow that stream through the shadowy recesses of the forest in bending light (1988), welcoming our eyes to this secluded retreat . . . While Haden's glades glow with a denser less frenetic energy, the confusion of what is foreground and what is background persists. These paintings stand on the threshold of entropy, a place where disorder is neither threatening nor disarming, but instead, a thing of beauty."

Sara Grusin in Museum & Arts Washington Magazine, March/April 1990




"...Josephine Haden's series of acrylic paintings display the expressive vitalism familiar from her previous showings . . . where she . . . confers life on the landscape of the imagination . . . executed in shades of yellow, green, orange and black, Out There might be a bug's eye view of a forest of bamboo. In Bending Light, a comet trails its tail through a thicket. Cross Currents, another woodland scene, is as if lashed by a rainbow colored storm. In all these works, the viewer confronts a screen of marks. They dart, dance and swirl in opposing rhythms, directed seemingly by a play of ever changing fields of force."

Alice Thorson in The New Art Examiner, June 1990




"Josephine Haden is a painter intent on rebuilding. She constructs imaginary landscapes from countless slender brush strokes of pure color. Like teeming vortexes, her images suck the viewer into dense worlds of form and color and contort our perceptions of scale and distance . . . What is initially seen in the far distance jumps forward to the surface plane. What, at first, seems merely a curved brightly colored brush stroke takes on tremendous speed and whips the imagination from the depths of a Wishing Well to the sky reflected on its surface, or into the back of a Dragonfly's Eye . . . Her mysterious thickets and bottomless pools of water are reminiscent of nowhere in particular. Rather, they recall the archetypal forests and magical wishing wells embedded deep within our psyches. If you look long and hard enough at Haden's work, you'll swear you can smell the mossy richness at their core."

Florence Gilbard in the Catalog of the 21st International Painting Exhibition
at the Grimaldi Chateau-Museum, Haut-de-Cagnes, France, March 1989




"There is a great deal of energy here, confident brush stroke and use of paint and much openness to experimentation and possibility . . . Haden is walking that difficult line between abstraction and representation, and, like Anselm Kiefer, trying that out on the landscape."

Pamela Kessler in The Washington Post, March 11, 1988


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