A Landscape Painter

Born and raised in the Bronx, Daniel Hauben is acclaimed as the borough’s most versatile and prolific painter. Working in both oil paint and chalk pastel, he has spent 25 years capturing the life of the Bronx on canvas or paper, setting up his easel en plein air on street corners and overpasses, under elevated subway trains or in playgrounds. “I’m a landscape painter,” he says. “It just so happens that the landscape I paint is most often the Bronx.”

His work captures the play of light and shadow in the urban environment: the patterns cast on the street by the elevated train trestles, the windows of apartment buildings gilded at sunset, the sharp white heat of a sidewalk in high summer, or the deeply shadowed canyons between tall buildings in late autumn afternoons.

Not Just A City Boy

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 the life that revolves around you,” he says. Hauben has painted in Spain, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, France, Southern India and Costa Rica, as well as New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia and California.

The Studio Pieces

In addition to painting en plein air, Hauben spends many hours in his Riverdale studio, creating larger, often more imaginative pieces. He has experimented with low relief works in plaster, glass and bronze, in addition to continuing to produce his signature oil relief paintings.

The Art of Light

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.