Time traveling the Bronx through paintings

The northwest Bronx has changed a lot in the last 50 years and with nearly 200 works, artist Daniel Hauben has immortalized its neighborhoods and people in paint. 

Hauben grew up in the Hillside Homes in Eastchester. Women would often hang their laundry on the roof while their children played.  One day, his mother found a syringe on the roof , inspiring their move to Kingsbridge in 1965 when he was about 8 or 9 years old. Upon their move, Hauben painted his first landscape. 

“My parents let me do a mural on the bedroom wall with all the key elements; somebody walking a dog, a squirrel climbing a tree, windows or whatever,” he said.  

While Hauben has no photographic evidence of the painting, he holds the memory of it dear. He shared a bedroom with his older brother where two beds laid across from each other. When Hauben’s friend came over, they tied towels around their necks and jumped across the room from bed to bed, pretending they were Superman flying through the city, with his mural as the backdrop.  

Hauben's brother, nine years his senior, was into art and music and attended Cooper Union. 

“So that’s number one,” the artist said of his influences. “Number two, my grandmother. She happened to walk into an art class and noticed at the end of class that people were throwing out paint.”  

Being a woman from the old world who couldn’t bear to see anything go to waste, she collected the paint and collaborated with young Hauben to create whimsical scenes of her childhood.  

The Bronx native followed his artistic talent through school and life, attending the High School of Music and Art in the 70s and then dropping out to travel India with his older brother and his girlfriend. He would later find himself in Boston and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts before and then went back to New York and enrolled in the School of Visual Arts in the 80s where he received his bachelor's degree. The youngest of five, his siblings’ accomplishments before him sufficed his parents, allowing him the freedom to pursue a career as an artist. 

“My oldest siblings were kind of overachievers and I feel like they fulfilled my parents' need for having successful children,” he said laughing. 

Coming of age in the 60s and 70s, he also attributed his parent’s laxed approach to the “free love” and hippie culture of the time.  

He was never into sports, neither did he participate in the things kids his age were often occupied with. So, he would often bother his mother to let him stay home from school to create his art.    

“Before my father came home, I would do all these drawings and like throw it at him as soon as he walked in the door and hope that would smooth things in response to me staying home again from school,” he said. 

Hauben speaks like he has more to say, often putting his hand to his head or his hands on his hips. He wears eyeglasses on a rope around his neck, plaid button down shirts and utilitarian pants and sneakers, more often than not, covered in paint. In his studio along 247th Street in Riverdale, he listens to a variety of music, from jazz pianist Marcus Roberts to Bela Fleck on banjo. 

He calls himself a landscape painter, but his “Tropical Big Bang” strays far from reality. Painted in warm hues of purple, orange and red, the painting is an acid trip on canvas. Sinuous branches spread across the canvas as translucent bodies float through the sky. Hauben began painting it during the pandemic and five years later, he’s still discovering new parts of the work. A process he developed over the years. His teachers once chastised him for his style, telling him his work was “all over the place.”  

Hauben listened to them and said it took him 20 years to regain his sense of imagination. 

The Bronxite began his career “en plein air,” a French term for outdoor painting, where the artist captures life in real time. But he grew exhausted by the process and began working indoors.  

In his studio, his multi-paneled paintings hang on the walls near a long banner – a keepsake from his commissioned work for the Grand Concourse’s 100^th anniversary. He has a tin of Keebler soda crackers filled with paint tube caps and a box of old camera film containers he uses to preserve leftover paint. 

His oil on canvas, and sometimes wood panel paintings, inspire nostalgia, capturing a moment in time. His painting of the 238^th Street staircase along Waldo Avenue is one of his most popular, but he couldn’t tell you why.  

“He won so many of those BRIO awards from the Bronx Council of the Arts, some people thought they should rename it to the Danny Hauben award,” Gary Axelbank quipped.  

The TV host proudly hangs a Hauben panting on his wall which is visible in every episode of Bronx Buzz. Hauben has been a guest of the show on several occasions with his first appearance dating back to the 90s.  

Hauben won the Bronx Recognizes Its Own Excellence award in 1989, 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 2003, 2005 and in 2019. 

He calls himself a traditionalist, in that he focuses on a foreground, middle ground and background. But he’ll also tell you none of it is premeditated. He’s funny and kind-hearted and he’ll give you a ride if you need one. 

Hauben called many of his teachers boring, who spent most of class time lecturing instead of doing, except for one.  

“In Japanese or Chinese brush painting, the teacher would say one word,” Hauben recalled. “He would say chrysanthemum or bamboo and then you’d gather around and you would watch how he painted.”  

A practice Hauben carries with him today in his own teachings.  

From Riverdale Senior Services to the Riverdale Neighborhood House to the Riverdale Y, he has been leading art classes all over the neighborhood for decades, both in person and remote. Prior to that, he taught art in schools from the Pastel Society of America to City College. He also worked with renowned photojournalist, Michael Kamber in creating the book, “The Bronx Artist Documentary Project,” published in 2015.

“Before you put your brush on the paper, it’s very scary, but once you get started, it kind of flows out,” Esperanza Caño told The Press, a student of Hauben’s. “He would say, ‘why don’t you look at the display this way or try that color?’ He’s got such a great eye.”  

Hauben still lives in Kingsbridge with his wife Judy, where he continues to paint landscapes of the Boogie Down.

Meet the artist on May 6 at 7 p.m. at 3247 Johnson Ave. where he will speak on his creatve journey and show more than 100 photos of his artwork.