Recently, DCist met with artist Laurel Hausler at her studio in Fairfax. We spent a few hours with Hausler, basset hound Lucy by her side, discovering her ghostly artwork, her obsession with old dolls and apothecaries, her literary influences, and even the likeness of Nevin Kelly to Tim Gunn. Hausler is represented locally by both the Nevin Kelly Gallery and Art Whino, as well as by galleries in South Carolina and Vermont. With two upcoming area solo shows, at Alexandria’s Atheneum in May and at Nevin Kelly in October, now is the perfect time to become reacquainted with her work.

A shy and easily affected child, Hausler never embraced art in school. Instead, she engulfed herself in literature, seeing her own stories and characters between the pages. At age 20, Hausler moved to New Orleans, inspired by its spiritual and haunting aesthetic. Upon her return to the D.C. area a year later, she began a career as a visual artist. Over the past ten years, she has been painting feverishly, reaching a point in her career where galleries are pursuing her regularly, and thus providing her with constant motivation and enough time for experimentation.

She describes her work as “big, juicy, ghostly oil paintings,” many of which contain other-worldly images of spirits and hauntings, and portray the dark, chaotic emotion of the women pictured. Her paintings are often informed by her real life as well as literature, and, she says, “sometimes it’s not an image that influences me, but a word or phrase.” Over the past year, Hausler has progressed as an artist, refining her language and embracing the never-finished quality of oil paint. Now, she never stops work on a painting until fully satisfied, and given the recent influx of interest by area galleries, this strategy has been quite successful.

Hausler is currently working simultaneously on a room full of several large paintings which deal with women, ghosts, poltergeists, domesticity and chaos. One piece is inspired by “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a powerful 1891 short story about a woman confined by her doctor husband to the upstairs bedroom of their house and forbidden to work. Haunted and claustrophobic, these pieces communicate Hausler’s personal life without her knowledge — almost as if a ghost was reaching from within her and onto the canvas. While Hausler claims “You’re the filter of what goes into your work, so it’s always about you,” she is genuinely surprised when I draw the connection between her current work and some changes in her personal life that we have been discussing. Hausler just creates; the meaning reveals itself later. She sees her artwork as a “way of relating to the world,” and states, “as a shy person, the paintings can speak for me. I don’t mind that.”

Moving upstairs from her studio to see some finished artwork, Hausler stopped to discuss Reverie, a large, dark painting featured in the December Hope and Fear exhibit at the Arlington Arts Center. Unlike many of her other paintings, Reverie (left) came about very quickly. The process began as a hurried, frustrated attempt to cover an unsuccessful piece, and ended to form a beautiful, textured, and eerie painting depicting a daydream of death. Inspired by an old photograph and her often overwhelming fear of death, she painted quickly using a palette knife clumped with diluted brown paint. Like many of Hausler’s other work, the result is formally quite simple but equally mysterious and intriguing. With so many images of death and haunting, one has to wonder if the artist has seen ghosts in her life. Her answer: “No, but I think I’ve heard them. Have you?”

Photos of Laurel Hausler and Reverie courtesy of the artist.