Select Available Works
September 2023
https://bio.site/edhaddaway
“The experience I have in making art is essentially dreaming while I am awake. It is as if I have gotten comfortable enough with my subconscious that I can move in for a visit with it and still retain the ability to control the materials that I find in reality.”
~ Ed Haddaway
Standing in judgement, The Critic, is a symbol of the strife and irony of doing anything in one’s own life which one cares deeply about and then presenting it to the world. Humorously, the sculpture is standing in the garden as though it's gawking at the other work.
Haddaway likes the idea that the sculpture represents both human and animal, challenging questions of perception and asking the audience to take notice.
The Critic
120 x 48 x 24 in Painted Steel
$8,000
The wish to reconnect with his own imagination, dreams, and desires, which initiated his interest in creation from an early age continues to develop even as Haddaway himself ages. Frequently vexed by questions of success and failure inherent with the selfproclaimed position of 'artist,' this piece juxtaposes two dynamic ideas representing the soul, both dark and light. It is often thought that without the dark we would not appreciate that light. For Haddaway, this piece represents the balance of those sides throughout his life.
Precarious Dance of Trees
23 x 9 x 11 in Painted Steel
$3,800
Ambiguous Message in her Madness
38 x 24 x 20 in Painted and Rusted Steel
$6,200
Billy’s Dirty Moose Joke
32 x 22 x 18 in Painted Steel
$5,800
Early Morning Walk 216 x 288 x 72 in Painted Steel
$150,000
Saturday Night It’s Like a Monster Come to Dinner
120 x 72 x 72 in
Rusted Steel
$35,000
So Happened Before Dream
150 x 132 x 66 in
Painted Rusted Steel
$70,000
Momma Bird for Momma
102 x 72 x 48 in
Rusted Steel
$48,000
From Daddy Wall and Other Stories
112 x 56 x 20 in Painted Steel
$40,000
Haddaway’s memories of his father as a stoic, silent, and formal man lead to the creation of this piece. The ‘wall’ in the piece speaks of the culture in which men are not encouraged to share their emotional experience. For Haddaway, his relationship with his father was limited because of their inability to connect deeply.
Three Birds Alluding 45 x 28 x 18 in
Painted and Rusted Steel
$8,000
Shadow Night Device 55 x 22 x 24 in
Painted and Rusted Steel
$10,000
Flight: Persistence, Obstinacy and the Pertinacious 108 x 54 x 48 in Painted and Rusted Steel
$30,000
As a child, Haddaway was exposed, through his family, to the idea of flight. His mother was a pilot flying for the United States during WW2, and several uncles were pilots. They were frequently discussing the subject of flight over meals. His childhood understanding of flight lead him to create his first failed attempt at a flying machine around age six. This work is a manifestation of that original childhood project.
$3,700
As a child, Haddaway constructed a large, heavy object from a pile of wood, which he determined was a boat. After loading up the family station wagon and the “boat”, the object was brought to water where it was played upon until sinking. Haddaway was reminded of this experience, thinking of Early Try at Stonehenge Boating also being a boat, without being a boat.
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Early Try at Stonehenge Boating
24
14 x 8 in Painted Steel $4,500
Karma Goes for a Ride
28 x 26 x 14 in Painted Steel
27 x 24 x 10 in Painted Steel
$4,500
From a Series of Great Misfortunes
27 x 24 x 10 in Painted Steel
$4,500
11 x 18 x 9 in
$2,300
Plan for Quick Release
27 x 19 x 7 in Painted Steel
$3,800
Assault on the Wall of Sleep
24 x 14 x 8 in Painted Steel
$4,500
Structure of Cats
20.5 x 11 x 9 in Painted Steel
$2,500
$4,200
$4,200
Great Flood of the Inevitable
17 x 14 x 14 in Painted Steel
He
Shade
Door 23 x 26 x 5 in Painted Steel
“Even as a kid,” Ed Haddaway remembers, "I was really into making things. My parents would stick us in the back yard and we had hammers and nails and boards. There was a basic primal need to put things together from about the age of five.” Haddaway, a bearded burly man who speaks with a distinct Texas twang, grew up in Fort Worth—“very mundane middle class,” as he puts it. His father was an investor in the stock market who regularly took time off to hunt and fish; his mother was a homemaker. “It wasn’t that I wanted to be an artist, I just didn’t know what else to do.” One of his three siblings, a brother, had ambitions as a concert pianist. “I would wake up every morning and he was playing the piano,” he recalls. “My persona became that of the artist. For whatever reason, I haven’t quit yet.”
One of the advantages of Fort Worth, says Haddaway, was a “tremendous museum system.” Because of his ability in elementary-school art classes, he was selected to take courses at the children’s museum. “I went twice a week. This lady would say ‘Draw!’ and we would draw. I was amazed at what she could get out of us.”
After a couple of years at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Haddaway realized how much he loved school and continued on to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The coursework was fairly standard, the basics of drawing and painting, but because it was the early 1970s “there was a big wave of Conceptualism and Minimalism,” he recalls. “We had mostly grad students for professors. One wanted us to stop making stuff and read books about the end of art. That really upset me. I was told there would be no more art. We were all gonna sit around and think.”
After earning his BFA, Haddaway took off and wandered around the Western U.S., heading north to Canada, and taking odd jobs here and there. He ended up working in state parks, living in his camper. “I had no roots,” he recalls. “I didn’t know what to do with myself. I anchored myself outside of Denton, Texas, and started pursuing grad school at North Texas State.”
Then came a job as an art handler with the Delahunty Gallery in Dallas, run by dealers Laura Carpenter and Murray Smithers. Though he lived in a poor area outside the city, the work gave him access to wealthy collectors. Suddenly he was around “people who had enough money to think about art,” as he puts it. The experience of encountering high seriousness coupled with money made him more determined “to go for it,” he says. “I started working nonstop on my own stuff.”
“I had ideas at that time about the uselessness of art,’ he continues. “I started making machine-like things that didn’t work. Later, when I started traveling around I would pick up scraps along the road and just put things together.”
In his mid-20s Haddaway landed back in Albuquerque, where he “hung out with a guy who was a total madman artist.” He also became involved with a co-op gallery called Meridian and once we got to the 1980s it seemed like an explosion. Albuquerque was a great place to develop as an artist, and you could get shows in Santa Fe. Another gallery in Denver got interested in me and picked me up.”
Haddaway has been in Albuquerque ever since, working on tabletop-sized sculptures and large commissions. Though his work contains nods to Calder and, less obviously, to David Smith, there’s a jaunty buoyant cartoony aspect that is all his own—along with elements of the Southwest, like cactuses and hints of other spiky plant life. He’s also attracted to old patinas and rusty surfaces and “things being built up and falling apart at the same time,” as he explained in a short PBS documentary about his work.
“I’ve always paid a lot of attention to dreams,” he says. “I wrote them down. But then they scared the hell out of me. So I quit doing that.” Making art, he says, allows him a pipeline to the unconscious. “Carl Jung’s ideas gave me a rationale for what I did. Not that I am a big follower of Jung, but it seemed we were on the same wavelength.”
Partially deaf since childhood (he has been wearing hearing aids since he was in the third grade and now has a cochlear implant), Haddaway calls himself an “extreme introvert.” Art provided him with a way of connecting with others. “I’ve always had to do an elaborate guessing game to find out what other people were saying, but when they pay attention to my art it’s easier than if they’re paying attention to me.
“Making art has been a lifeline,” he adds. “Otherwise I think I would have gone nuts.”
Ann Landi$4,500
$4,900
$4,500
Fade to Black Tea Dance
31 x 17 x 30 in
Painted Steel and Mixed Media
Was Your Dream and My Volcano
24 x 13 x 16 in
Painted Steel and Mixed Media
Virgin Worlds Relic
25 x 25 x 12 in
Painted Steel and Mixed Media
Brown Brownie Sets Sail (Traversing the Sea of Troubles)
32 x 38 x 26 in Painted Steel
$7,000
Basic Vision with Enigma (from my Hospital Room)
22 x 22 x 17 in Painted Steel
$5,800
Portrait of the Artist Suffering for His Art
32 x 25 x 15 in Painted Steel
$7,000
Clock Time Turns – Clock Time Chimes
$4000
$9000
28 x 18 x 21 in
Painted Steel
Vision at Lake Whitney
44 x 37 x 18 in
Painted and Rusted Steel
Brain Food 32 x 26 x 13 in
$8,000
“Faint Whispers” He Said 28 x 28 x 18 in Painted Steel
$4,000
Painted Steel
An avowed introvert who has had a profound hearing impairment since birth, Haddaway retreated into three obsessions: art, introspection, and exploring his dreams. This coalesced into his subject matter as an expression of these dreams combined with playful imagination. Like many artists, working in portraits, the work features an artist represented as a rabbit holding a portrait signed R. Bunny as a nod to Duchamp.
80 x 26 x 35 in
Painted Steel
$9,000
Portrait of Artist as a Young Bunny
Painted and Rusted Steel
168 x 125 x 108 in $160,000
The most recent completed work by Haddaway, Tower of Words and Leaves is a departure from the highly colored caricatures and silhouettes assembled into fantasy scenes. The work grows like a tree from the ground, arms branching out with typewriters, assembled with objects you might almost recognize. The impetus for the work grew from the purchase of an old typewriter that sat around for years, percolating into ideas around how words and leaves are similar in the sense that sometimes while important, they fall away and are forgotten.
Eternal Maybe
22 x 18 x 9 in
Painted Aluminum
$2,800
Underwater Dreaming
25 x 16 x 8 in
Painted Aluminum
$2,800
But for the Indiscreet
32 x 32 x 1 in
Painted Aluminum
$2,800
Hail Mary 30 x 28 x 8 in
Painted Aluminum $2,800
The Homecoming Dance 36 x 14 x 2 in Painted Aluminum $2,800
Hard Choices
25 x 23 x 93 in
Painted Steel $2,800
Night Poets and the Taste of Reason
16 x 13 x 10 in
Painted and Rusted Steel
$3,200
Short Story From the Book of Yets
11 x 8 x 8 in
Painted and Rusted Steel
$2,400
Sculpture for a Fancy House
37 x 12 x 8 in
Painted and Rusted Steel
$2,400
Five Birds Alighting
20 x 14 x 7 in
Painted and Rusted Steel $3,800
The Four Directions
30 x 28 x 29 in
Painted and Rusted Steel $2,500
Rock Altar Red and Yellow
24 x 12 x 15 in
Painted and Rusted Steel with Rock
$3,100
Round Rock Altar
12 x 9 x 11 in
Rusted Steel with Rock
$3,400
Rock Altar Blue Swirl
30 x 17 x 16 in
Painted and Rusted Steel with Rock $3,800
34 x 20 x 15 in Painted Steel
$6,300
Friend of the Bright Red Ball
14.5 x 13 x 9 in Painted Steel
$2,200
Playing with the Bright Red Ball
A Play in the Woods
22 x 22 in
Framed Monotype
$1,500
Some Sort of Creation Myth
22 x 22 in
Framed Monotype
$1,200
Beach at the Edge of the Sea
22 x 22 in Monotype
$600
Working in a Realm of Ghosts
22 x 22 in Monotype
$600
Dog Dance: The Awkward Step 22 x 22 in Monotype
$600
Monument, Absurd Monument
15 x 15 in
Framed Monotype
$900
Pinkie…Pain, George, and Then
There Was a Time When… 19 x 26 in Monotype
$650
22 x 22 in Monotype
$600
(Additional Monotypes available for sale upon inquiry)
