| Issue #48, March 9, 2007 |
Honoring the Artist:
Barbara Hadden
by Marion Wolberg Weiss
While the title of this week’s cover (“Winter”) seemingly holds no surprises, the work’s artist is full of them. Barbara Hadden is a woman of depth and character, her diverse background suggesting the source of her substantial worldview.
Q: You’ve said that the watercolor on the cover is from your imagination. What makes it effective is that it could be anywhere. Where did you draw inspiration from?
A: Maybe Maine. This is the first fall I haven’t gone. We lived in a fishing village that I loved; I could hear the boats leaving at 3 a.m.
Q: Sag Harbor must be similar. How do you like it here, and would you like to live any other place?
A: No, I want to stay here. I’ve been here since 1990. I don’t even mind the crowds in the summer. The more people, the better for business.
Q: Speaking of people, your past positions dealt with helping less fortunate individuals. Obviously, you haven’t spent all your years painting professionally.
A: In New York, I worked for an adoption agency for hard-to-place children, and I was also an occupational therapist. Art is isolating, so I liked being with people.
Q: While you were in New York, you studied acting for quite a while. That’s a different kind of pursuit altogether.
A: Yes, I studied at the American Academy and the Herbert Bergoff Studio.
Q: You also had what I would call an unusual vocation when you moved out here.
A: I baked cakes for a restaurant, and I was a cook for the writer Jean Stafford. Actually, I’ve been a cook for twenty-five years. Jean had had a stroke and I tried to teach her how to speak.
Q: Which begs the question, how did your early life set the scene for these diverse and special professions? Was anyone in your family an artist?
A: I grew up in Massachusetts and the Peekskills. My parents wanted my sisters and me to be teachers, but I was rebellious and ran off to New York. My mother had had a stroke; that lead to my being an occupational therapist. By the way, there were artists on both sides of my family. My mother’s side was influenced by the Hudson River Valley artists.
Q: How was life in New York for someone like you, who considered herself shy?
A: I loved it. People in the arts were special, living in their own little world. I remember doing odd things, like when I was studying acting, I’d rehearse in a phone booth.
Q: Do you regret not studying art like you studied acting?
A: No. You can’t help the way you paint. If I had studied painting, I may have copied my teachers’ style.
Q: What are you working on now? What does art mean to you now?
A: Right now I’m doing little canvases, little snippets of images that I see when I walk down Main Street in Sag Harbor. My head is swimming with images. Art is like meditation. Very calming. Art is my obsession.
Works by Ms. Hadden are available at Sag Harbor’s Winter Tree Gallery.
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