Artist Eric Haze Is Making the Past, Present

In the midst of the pandemic in 2020, Brooklyn-based artist Eric Haze relocated to Northwest Woods in East Hampton where he settled into an artist residency at the Elaine de Kooning House.

As an artist, Haze earned great success in his teens and early 20s in the world of street art. In the early 1980s, he exhibited his graffiti works alongside friends and contemporaries Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat in “New York/New Wave,” a 1981 show at MoMA PS1, and his work also appeared in the 1984 exhibition “Emerging Talent” at Tony Shafrazi’s SOHO Gallery.

“We were the cover story in the Village Voice,” said Haze, referring to a 1980 article by Richard Goldstein in which he and four of fellow graffiti artists were profiled. “I was thrust into a career as an artist. It was a choice, but also a default. We were sort of thrashing around as kids, but we were also sort of pronounced as a movement very early on.

“I think it put a lot of pressure on us prematurely to figure out if, how and what it meant to be great as artists,” he added.

A decade or so later, Haze shifted gears and became known for his commercial work, which included creating logo and album cover designs for clients such as the Beastie Boys, Tommy Boy Records, Run-D.M.C., EPMD and LL Cool J.

But during his 2020 residency at the Elaine de Kooning House, Haze was not interested in continuing in the artistic vein in which he had built his reputation. Instead, he set out to harness a different energy and creative path, and spent his residency working on artistic impulses that had long been suppressed or were not previously explored as part of his professional career.

Perhaps these were impulses brought on by the isolation of the pandemic where he had space and time to go somewhere new. Or perhaps it was something else — a full-circle moment related to the fact that, as a 10-year-old boy in 1972, he had a specific and direct connection to Elaine de Kooning when she painted a portrait of Haze and his younger sister, Dana, in her New York City loft near Union Square.

“My father taught at Columbia in the ’60s and ’70s, and one of his students was David Shapiro, who became an esteemed poet and art critic,” Haze explained. “Through my father’s friendship with David, Elaine painted us as a favor to David.”

Haze recalls sitting for de Kooning three or four times as she worked on the portrait, and during his visits, she would set Haze up with paint and brushes and encourage him to create his own works while he was there.

“I remember Elaine being very tough and firm, but also caring,” said Haze, who added that he had always thought of himself as an artist, even prior to the encouragement and tutelage he received from de Kooning. “I absolutely wanted to become an artist. An artist was what I was and I couldn’t imagine being anything else.

“The fundamental point here is that I had this experience when I was 10 years old with Elaine, went straight down to Pearl Paint, bought canvas and oil paints and a palette — within a year graffiti came around when I was 11 and wiped the slate clean.”

With that early experience firmly packed away, Haze got on with his career in street art, only to realize all these years later that there was more to discover from those long-ago interactions in de Kooning’s New York City loft — but this time, it would play out at de Kooning’s house and studio deep in Northwest Woods during the isolation of a pandemic-era residency.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this was a really important formative experience — there’s something there I have completely slept on my whole life,’” he said. “The revelation was a shock to me when I got my head around it. So I went to the residency — not to continue doing the current work I’m involved in. I went there to go completely against the grain in what I had been doing or was expected to do, and go back to the fork in the road and unpack who and what I might have become had graffiti not come along.

“I’m uniquely grateful for the timing — to have this experience and embrace it,” he said of the residency. “I didn’t want to use Elaine’s studio for the same thing I had been doing.”

The fruits of Haze’s labor from that 2020 residency are on view now at the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs in an exhibition titled “Elaine de Kooning x Eric Haze: Memory Image,” which runs through May 25.

On view are works by both Haze and de Kooning, including two colorful abstract paintings that Haze created under de Kooning’s tutelage in 1972, as well as de Kooning’s original painting of Haze and his sister, alongside paintings that Haze created during the residency, including black and white versions of his original abstracts as well as his own version of de Kooning’s portrait of him and his sister.

In conjunction with the show, on Saturday, May 24, a 6 p.m., Haze will give an artist talk at Pollock-Krasner House where he will share insights into his career and the story of his connection to de Kooning.

As he set out to build his body of residency work at the Elaine de Kooning House, Haze explained that he initially began by painting interior views of the studio space itself.

“The only thing I planned to do were the interiors and abstracts that related to the painting of ’72,” Haze said. “But my grand challenge was to learn how to do portraiture and teach myself to become comfortable with people in a way that was influenced by Elaine, but did not parrot her.

“I had already committed on pulling the plug on my life and being in total isolation in Elaine’s studio,” he said. “I was going out there for a two-week stretch when the pandemic happened. I was on the LIE when it was happening. My wife freaked out, like everybody, by the time I got to Long Island, I had already figured out if the world is shutting down, I’m at total peace and isolation out here.”

What was initially supposed to be two weeks ended up being two months.

“I really ended up going down these rabbit holes in my life, personally and artistically,” Haze said. “I had brought a major hard drive with me and it was completely unplanned and unexpected, but I stumbled on a couple photos of my youth — I thought if I want to learn how to draw people, let me start with myself.”

“Writers write what they know — it made sense to use myself as a sounding board. I ended up doing some spiritual time travel backwards, and randomly taking cues from parts of my psyche, ended up doing a series of 10 self-portraits,” he said. “Looking back at the trajectory of the work, the first ones were very stylized in terms of my design hand. I wasn’t trying to be literal. I was seeing how I can stylize things in my own way. In some ways, it was a veneered excuse to not do it right.

“But I gained confidence and skills and did not just let my hands do the design thing,” he added. “I allowed myself that freedom to explore the unknown.”

Though he definitely considers her to be both a mentor and a muse in his life, Haze only saw Elaine de Kooning one more time after the 1972 portrait sessions.

“Elaine came over to have coffee with my mother when I was 13 or 14,” Haze said. “I came in to say, ‘hello,’ and she was interested in knowing that I was doing graffiti — and that’s all.

“I asked her all the things I needed to ask her when I was in the studio. Whether it was the chicken or the egg, a choice or just happened, Elaine really became my spirit guide throughout the whole process,” said Haze, who added that when faced with challenges during the residency, he called on her to keep him moving ahead. “I had come for my own spiritual journey — this was a really, really transformational experience for me as an artist — and I wasn’t going to let anyone or anything keep me from getting to the other side of the bridge I was crossing.”

In the end, Haze uncovered what had long been hidden in terms of his talent as a serious painter and learned a great deal about himself as an artist along the way.

“One of the things bouncing around in my head was, ‘Do I have to distance myself from 30 years of design to be taken seriously as a fine artist again?’” he asked. “I’m known more for that than as a painter. Being taken seriously as a painter was my goal.

“I’ve had that moment where I’ve said, ‘You know what? These are all false constructs.’ It’s not up to me to decide what’s fine art and what’s commercial,” he said. “I’ll use a brush as much as I can in the course of commercial work. I considered everything on the job training. The results I’ve gotten from the residency gave me the confidence that, not only am I legitimately a painter again, I have a wider range than I had given myself credit for.”

Eric Haze presents an artist talk in conjunction with “Elaine de Kooning x Eric Haze: Memory Image” on Saturday, May 24, at 6 p.m. at Pollock-Krasner House, 830 Springs Fireplace Road, East Hampton. Tickets for Haze’s talk are $20 at pkhouse.org.