Julian Hatton

Slow Curve by Julian Hatton.

Hatton was born in Grand Haven, Michigan.[1] The cold Michigan climate with two months of good weather each year, contrasted with the cold flat landscape influenced his sense of color, he recalled later.[14] He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1974 in the school's first co–educational class. Hatton graduated from Harvard University in 1979 with a major in art history.[1] Painting in the north of France helped him develop his understanding of color and landscape.[14] His first application to the Studio School in New York was rejected since he lacked a portfolio. He studied with painter Fernando Zobel in Spain, returned with a portfolio, and was accepted.[15] He enrolled at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture from 1980 to 1982.[1][16] After school, Hatton lived the life of a struggling artist, working at the Water Club restaurant in Manhattan for eight years.[15]

Later he worked with decorative painters, painting interiors of apartments and restaurants, while living in SoHo.[17] In between jobs, Hatton took his portable easel and paint supplies and bicycled to Breezy Point and Prospect Park.[18] Often he would work new painting over old, using parts of the old painting to help solve formal and symbolic problems, while responding to the landscape at hand.[18]

Close to the Wizard of Oz by Julian Hatton.

Through trial and error he discovered an innate affinity for bold saturated color as well as a love of abstraction that shadowed naturalism. His work has been called "lyrical."[19] During these years he often worked with fellow artist and wife Alison Berry. His work began to receive recognition, and his paintings started to be shown in art galleries.

Hatton exhibited at Manhattan galleries including Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Kathryn Markel Gallery, Frederieke Taylor Gallery, Frank Mario Gallery, Jon Leon Gallery, Eighth Floor Gallery, Lohin Geduld Gallery and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibit.[1] He has exhibited his artwork in Washington, Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas, Charlotte, La Jolla, and Southwest Harbor and Belfast in Maine.[1] His work was shown internationally at the Museum at Rochefort-en-Terre in Brittany, France.[1]

ArtInfo described his paintings as "boldly integrating invented and observed shapes and colors" with his "own lexicon of shapes and lines which he arranges in innovative ways" using a "homemade visual syntax" yielding a "feast of contradictions."[3] During these years he taught at the Rhode Island School of Design as well as Swarthmore College and the Vermont Studio Center.[20] His paintings have appeared in the Hijirizaka Collection in Tokyo, the IBJ Schroder Bank & Trust in New York, and at Brook Partners in Dallas. His paintings are in numerous collections, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to the Steve Wynn collection in Las Vegas.

New York Times critics have described his painting style as a "layered shapes in saturated colors"[21] which were "vibrant, playful, semi-abstract landscapes" which "layers broad, richly colored shapes of trees, rivers and hills into funky, tautly frontal arcadian visions."[10] Paintings had a "mix of Fauvism, Abstract Expressionism and outsider vision.[10]

Art critic John Goodrich of the New York Sun felt Hatton's paintings were less "real" in terms of factual description but they "contain their own peculiar truths, evident in keenly felt colors and designs."[22] Goodrich felt Hatton "finds expression through his forms."[23] Hatton's paintings "remind us of the potency of a particular modernist aesthetic, and they reward prolonged looking."[23] Goodrich elaborated:

The paintings' most intriguing aspect, however, remains their combination of loose allusions and tight rhythms. As with Bonnard, a kind of muscular whimsy prevails.[22][24][25]

Critic Ann Landi of ARTnews wrote there was "something endearingly anachronistic about Julian Hatton's abstractions" which had an "unbridled love of pure, hot color," and compared Hatton to Arthur Dove, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Gauguin and the Fauvres.[12]

Critic David Ebony in ArtNet in 1996 described Hatton's paintings:

Julian Hatton paintings are ostensible landscapes, but they are not landscape scenes, nor impressions of landscape. Instead, the artist, inspired by natural forms, paints his thoughts about the interaction of humanity and nature. For Hatton, landscape painting is both a physical and a metaphysical exercise. His works are both microcosms and macrocosms, internal and external, of the body and outside the body. A work such as Double Dip has all the elements of a portrait, yet it remains recognizable as a landscape. Using jarring color relationships, halting, jagged lines and a large dose of humor, Hatton reveals to us a little known facet of our relationship to nature.

— Critic David Ebony[26]

Ebony wrote in 2005 in Art in America that Hatton "experiments with complex and sometimes contradictory spatial relationships" and that his landscapes "consist of Cubist-inspired fractured planes and shifting, multiple perspectives."[27] Critic Joel Silverstein in Reviewny.com suggested Hatton's paintings "sing to each other in a high key citron-like color" and compared him to Paul Gauguin, Miró and Hofmann.[13] He described Hatton as a "lyrical designer" who "abstracts form by promoting visual attractiveness."[13]

Artist Barbara Rothenberg, who teaches art at the Silver Mine Guild Arts Center in New Canaan, Connecticut, and who follows Hatton's career, suggested that Hatton's works were becoming more "abandoned" and that the artist was taking greater "risks"; she likes Hatton's use of the color red.[28]

Critic Hovey Brock writing in The Brooklyn Rail described Hatton's paintings as having a "healthy self-confidence not only in his artistic process, but also in the very enterprise of abstract painting."[29] Critic Peter Malone of Hyperallergic magazine described Hatton's 2019 show entitled Bewilderness as "vigorously overlapping perspectives are pulled into a unified whole made of delightfully unstable parts" that demonstrate a "copious gift for invention, expressed through witty references to flowers, trees, rivers, pathways, and other landscape elements."[9]

• 1992–MacDowell Residency Fellowship[4]
• 1993–National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C.[4]
• 1995–Rochefort-en-Terre, Art Colony Fellowship, Brittany, France[4]
• 1998–New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting[4]
• 2001–Pollock-Krasner Grant in Painting
• 2007–Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters[30]

• Landscape painting
• Abstract expressionism
• Fauvism
• American modernism

• Artist's website
• Artist's paintings online