In the Studio with Joseph Hart

In June, we had the pleasure of visiting Joseph Hart’s studio in Gowanus as he prepared for his current solo exhibition at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton.

He gave us a glimpse into his practice, which ranges from small works on paper to large-scale paintings. While being classified as abstract works, his process starts from sketches based on nature and his surrounding environment, evolving into layered forms and patterns, exploring complex color relationships and space. We enjoyed seeing the various parts of the process, sometimes beginning with a single marker line on white paper, and other times starting with a more fleshed out idea.

ARTIST STATEMENT & BIO

Joseph Hart is a New York City-based visual artist that makes abstract drawings and paintings. 

Utilizing graphite sticks and color pencil on paper, Hart begins his drawings with a series of playful dashes, quick jags, swooping curves, and wayward line-work as a set of foundational gestures. He then layers in shapes of color that wander across and through his dynamic compositions. 

While Hart considers his drawings as discrete works of art of their own, they also serve as idea maps (but not one-to-one sketches) for his paintings. Successful parts from multiple drawings will often be combined, tweaked, and re-imaged with acrylic crayon and paint on stretched canvas. The surface of Hart’s paintings can dance between smooth and crisp, textured and painterly.

Hart reflects on the inspiration behind his work: “I’ve realized that many of the aesthetic and conceptual kinks that I’m working through in abstraction—such as different types of beauty, organizing pictorial space in a unique and graceful way, competing forces, and how complicated our visual worlds and lives are—are mirrored in my own life. They’re in the rural New Hampshire landscape I grew up in and in the visual influences of my youth—things like cartoons, illustrated picture books, and skateboard graphics. They extend to my current life in NYC, where I’m surrounded by the harmonization of different types of people and cultures. Even the Catalpa tree that grows next to our apartment building, particularly in Autumn when its foliage begins to thin out, exposing the tree’s super structure of limbs that cut up the sky like a drawing. Its over-sized heart-shaped leaves begin to curl, flop, and drop, revealing elongated and stiletto-like seed pods. All the Catalpa’s contours begin to twist, overlap, kiss, and fight each other only to fall away, eventually re-growing in a new configuration. It’s a bit saccharine but I appreciate the tension and elegance and poetry of all these ideas, and I want to breathe some of that complexity, curiosity, and magic into my artwork.”

Joseph Hart’s artwork can be found in the public collections of the RISD Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Penland School of Craft and The City College of New York. Hart received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his partner and two children. 

JOSEPH HART – LIFE PAINTINGS

On view now at Halsey McKay Gallery through August 25, 2025

79 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY

For more information please email contact@halseymckay.com