Madison Gallery - Modern and Contemporary Art | Art Gallery La Jolla

Southern artist Maggie Hasbrouck creates provocative, playful, and imaginative images, most typically of children, in a unique medium she personally developed - photoencaustic. "By mixing dry pigments into wax and then applying them over a photograph, Hasbrouck achieves a texture and depth rarely captured by a printed image. She then layers varnishes over the surface, causing her pieces to almost glow," writes Donna Dorian Wall, freelance art critic.

Each composition presents a scene that is suspended from the natural order of time, and evokes a dreamscape, a precise emotive moment occurring in the imagination. Hasbrouck's consistent depiction of children as the key players in these scenes furthers her desire to profoundly influence the viewer:

"As every one of us has been a child - and every one of us has been shaped crucially by our childhood - the presence of children invariably inspires strong sensations, irresistible associations. Hasbrouck's underage cohort does not serve to 'put you in the picture' so much as to put the picture in you, to narrow (if not collapse) the emotional distance between you and the moment you see," states Peter Frank, curator at the Riverside Art Museum in Los Angeles and freelance art critic.

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