I am a product of the urban environment.

As a child raised in New York, I was constantly confronted by the physical geometry of the city, with all its order and disorder. When I looked out my window I saw other buildings just like mine, buildings encased in even rows of bricks, punctuated by windows, doors and fire escapes, and fringed on top with the haphazard intersecting patterns of antennae and water towers. As the sun moved overhead, I watched the shadows and the bright areas shift, revealing new shapes of light and dark, new depths to the dimensions of buildings and train trestles. The city, for me, was full of wonder and mystery, planned yet chaotic.

This is the source of my aesthetic, and in all my work I seek to discover and maintain an underlying structural foundation. In my cityscapes I attempt to find some method to the urban ‘madness’, and in landscapes I try to capture the unifying pattern that is inherent in nature’s randomness.

An avid traveler, Hauben has journeyed far afield, carrying his painting supplies and easel with him. “There is no better way to learn about a new place than to set up your easel on a corner and paint life as it revolves around you,” he says. Hauben has painted in Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Hungary, France, Southern India and Costa Rica, as well as New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia and California.

From the warm glow of an autumnal Virginia dusk captured in delicate pastel, to the bright afternoon light glancing off tall city buildings, to the gritty layers of textured oil paint carved out to portray shadowed, crumbling urban structures, Hauben is able to capture and express light as a life force. His art brings home to us what it means to live in this world – in both a natural and an urban environment – and it reminds us that there is beauty and fragility in both.

I am a product of the urban environment.

As a child raised in New York, I was constantly confronted by the physical geometry of the city, with all its order and disorder. When I looked out my window I saw other buildings just like mine, buildings encased in even rows of bricks, punctuated by windows, doors and fire escapes, and fringed on top with the haphazard intersecting patterns of antennae and water towers. As the sun moved overhead, I watched the shadows and the bright areas shift, revealing new shapes of light and dark, new depths to the dimensions of buildings and train trestles. The city, for me, was full of wonder and mystery, planned yet chaotic.

This is the source of my aesthetic, and in all my work I seek to discover and maintain an underlying structural foundation. In my cityscapes I attempt to find some method to the urban ‘madness’, and in landscapes I try to capture the unifying pattern that is inherent in nature’s randomness.

From the warm glow of an autumnal Virginia dusk captured in delicate pastel, to the bright afternoon light glancing off tall city buildings, to the gritty layers of textured oil paint carved out to portray shadowed, crumbling urban structures, Hauben is able to capture and express light as a life force. His art brings home to us what it means to live in this world – in both a natural and an urban environment – and it reminds us that there is beauty and fragility in both.