JOHN HAUGSE

painter animator teacher

John Haugse’s paintings have been exhibited at galleries throughout the west coast; his career as a painter has also been enriched with involvement with animation. His award-winning animated films, for Armand Hammer Productions, PBS, and others were honored at festivals here and abroad including the premiere international animation festival, in Annecy, France. He used a Guggenheim Fellowship to produce a hand-painted experimental film, “Encydmezyu.”

John tried his hand at many forms, including theater, poetry, and prose, but he has always returned to his first love, drawing and painting. His still life paintings, landscapes and abstracted nature pictures, his graphic cityscapes, and rural farmhouses, all present in his unmistakable style, based on observation first, explored with energy and, sometimes, wry humor. His graphic memoir about his father’s descent into Alzheimer’s has been translated into multiple languages around the world, and was released this year in a new edition revised by the author, “At A Certain Age: Heavy Snow revisited.”

John’s college education began at a Lutheran school in Nebraska, which his evangelical minister father had insisted on. John was soon hung in effigy on the campus yard; his classmates found this artist strange and unorthodox. After that he found his way back into the west coast art scene: a year later studying at The San Francisco Art Institute with Richard Diebenkorn and other artists; this study continued later at the University of Oregon. In later years, he added yet another career: professor, teaching with great success at the University of California Santa Barbara, the University of Oregon, Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and others.

John died on December 26, 2020 at the home of his partner of seven years, Roberta Miller. He leaves behind a large legacy of paintings and works on paper, and countless friends.