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.