Today we’d like to introduce you to Maria Haag.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Maria. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
Once upon a time, I did not want to be an artist. Making things, drawing and painting, that’s all well and good, I thought, but my whole life my family had struggled to make ends meet and I wanted to be able to make some money and have a comfortable life. And so, I moved in with cousins in North Dakota and started college for nursing. However, that didn’t last long. When looking at a patient’s necrotic wound was so interesting that I forgot how to use the insulin pen to give them a shot, I decided that maybe I should have chosen to study art. In 2014, I finally graduated from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas with a BFA concentrated in painting and graphic design. A year after graduating from college, I moved to Fort Worth with the goal of developing my painting skills and an art career while juggling a full-time job as a graphic artist. Just to mix things up, I also spent a year teaching art to grades 6-10 at Founders Classical Academy of Mesquite. One of the best experiences I’ve had has been traveling to Sicily for the past three years to paint murals in the little town of Prizzi as part of the Dallas in Prizzi project (check it out at https://www.facebook.com/DallasInPrizzi/).
Although I continued my studio practice during this time, I wanted a way to push my work further and decided to apply to grad school. I’m currently at the University of North Texas in my second year of grad school with one more year to go, working towards an MFA in painting and drawing.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
There have definitely been some challenges. The biggest has been financial, trying to have a studio practice and make enough money to get by, which meant juggling a full-time job and painting on the side. Learning to network is also a challenge for me, but hopefully with that practice makes perfect. And of course, there’s my love/hate relationship with that inner painting demon which whispers that, for each successful part of a painting, it can always be so much better.
We’d love to hear more about your work and what you are currently focused on. What else should we know?
I’m involved with both making and teaching art – I’m currently working on my studio practice and teaching Foundations drawing classes at the University of North Texas. My studio work is focused on the idea of life as an unavoidable journey through which each person is forced to travel. For me, the journey begins with suffering, seen as a sort of storm – a wrenching out of the common through a series of events, active or passive, which create a puncture in what is in order to open space for what could be. The fragility and malleability of the things and persons which make this journey is what inspires the form of my work. I’m fascinated by crushed and folded objects, especially paper and plastic, and often use them as a metaphor for my own experiences. It’s incredible that a flat, ordinary piece of paper can be transformed by the pressure of a hand into a miniature folded wonderland, and I think that the same sort of beauty can be produced by suffering in the body and soul of a person, or even an object. Perhaps that view is influenced by the years I spent working as a nurse aide in a nursing home and a group home for the developmentally disabled – both were jobs I loved just because of the people I helped to care for.
I find hands especially compelling and they show up often in my work – in their folds and shapes and weathering, they show history and personality in a much more subtle way than, for instance, a face. I also constantly challenge myself to find new ways to tread the line between abstraction and realism in order to let my paintings exist in a state of animated transformation.
What were you like growing up?
I grew up in rural North Dakota and Kansas, climbing buttes in the Badlands to search for quartz and arrowheads, riding my uncle’s horses and reading every book I could lay my hands on. I come from a large family – I’m the oldest of seven siblings – so it was always easy to find someone who wanted to join in on a game or adventure. It was more difficult to have quiet time alone, so perhaps that’s why I loved books so much; when I read a book, I become completely immersed in a different world. I have to thank my mom for many of my interests – she taught me how to bake bread when I was quite young, and I even won a bread baking contest at our local Ag Expo when I was 10, so baking and cooking has always been another source of exploration. She also ran a statue painting business, and one of my favorite activities was painting the trim of the robes and other embellishments on statues of the saints with a very tiny brush and gold paint that we mixed using a metallic powder. This translated into a love of medieval illumination and the paintings of Fra Angelico. I was lucky enough to attend a school that had a fantastic choir, and singing Renaissance polyphony was and still is one of my greatest joys. Playing piano was another musical avenue I enjoyed – I took lessons, off and on, throughout my school years and in undergrad – and I actually use it in my painting practice. When a piece is looking stiff or it’s difficult to get started, I think of it as improvising a piano piece instead of painting and usually have much better results.
Contact Info:
- Website: Mariahaagart.com
- Email: mariahaag7@gmail.com
- Instagram: @mariahaagart
- Facebook: https://m.facebook.com/mariahaagart/
Image Credit:
Juri Canzoneri, Olivia Cole, Maria Haag
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