A silhouetted horse ushering in a wave of destruction. The agony of a mother’s loss etched into her face. The spirit of a dead son rising. These are the images so hauntingly portrayed in Diane Hause’s latest vision, “Quest for the Echo’s Source.”

As you turn the corner of Hause’s organic studio in the industrial Castleberry Hill district, you cannot resist being pulled in by the force of this 8 foot by 16 foot memorial to the tsunami victims.
“As an artist I have to trust the creative process,” comments Hause. “It was so painful doing this painting. I kept thinking that
I wanted to find redemptionin this world right now.”

The painting portrays a mother and father grieving the loss of their son. The father’s body resists the force of the wave. The mother, her cheek pressed firmly to that of her son, echoes the traditional icon of the Madonna and child. Her body is in the shape of a
canoe, the vessel that gave birth to the child and now transports his soul to the world beyond. Embedded with countless metaphors, Hause used a collage of painting, wood carving, Chinese chops and Asian writing to seek solace and meaning
in the face of destruction.

The materialized canoe from Hause’s painting rests nearby, as
if to underscore the power of the subconscious upon reality. Handwritten notes are scattered within, attesting to the impact
this piece has had upon onlookers. Although the “Quest” was not officially presented until September, with an indefinite showing, its
conception has been a work of art itself. Hause put the creative process on display by allowing others to partake in its inception.

“I worked on it for about three months,” explains Hause. “I kept
the studio open. It was interesting because people were getting part of the process. I had people sitting in here weeping. Another one would come almost weekly to be with it.” “Quest,” which gave birth to a breathtaking series of collateral art, is just one show in Hause’s everchanging repertoire.

Since opening her studio in 1999, there has never been a shortage of exhibits. Hause’s inspiration comes from life events, personal experiences and, at times, the inexplicable. “I had a dream before 9/11 that led to my series ‘Thinly veiled misogyny,’” she recounts. “I was following four women cloaked in black. The next day in the
mail, my Amnesty International magazine came in. There were four women sitting on a park bench. It was about women in Afghanistan.” The article led Hause to RAWA (Revolutionary
Association of Women in Afghanistan), and ultimately her first benefit. Since then, she has been a champion for many causes and a trendsetter in Castleberry.

The quintessential bohemian, Hause’s quiet beginning as a minister’s daughter in North Carolina has resulted in an unbelievable life. Her story, better suited for a novel
than a humble article, spans the United States and the globe.
After obtaining a BFA in painting, she launched her career (and
nomadic lifestyle) by painting murals. Her first project led to a once-in-a lifetime opportunity. While working on the mural, she was approached by a contractor who was building a prototype
of one of the country’s first shopping malls.

“I said, ‘What’s a shopping mall?’” laughs Hause. She accepted
the well-paying job designing graphics, which resulted in her traveling throughout the U.S. Between jobs, she went to Mexico, planning on driving up through California to the next assignment.
“I stopped in Santa Barbara to go to the bathroom and stayed seven years.” Hause got her MFA in painting at UC Santa Barbara, and from there continued her exciting jaunt around the country, working as a teacher and pursuing her artistic passions.

Her travels eventually brought her to Atlanta, where she has been for the last ten years. In 1999 she decided to open her own studio.
“I had seen a psychic when I was looking around,” she recalls. “She said, ‘You’re going to find a space. I don’t want to call it a gallery; it’s more organic than that. You’re going to exhibit your work there.’ She asked, ‘Do you know what a pace car is?
You’re going to set the pace. You’ll be the pace car there.’” Hause’s psychic was dead-on. Since her arrival, Castleberry Hill, often called the SoHo of Atlanta, has become renowned for its art studios.

Like a true artist, Hause’s life, and work, is fluid and ever changing. Her exhibits are unpredictable, necessitating frequent visits. The future is anyone’s guess. Hause has thoughts of creating her own Walden by opening a studio on the quiet property she owns in North Carolina. But for the time being, she enjoys
anticipating her next inspiration. “The hardest thing is getting out of your own way,” she relates. One look around her burgeoning studio is evidence that Hause cleared that hurdle long ago.

3 Ten Haustudio is located at 310 Peters Street. For
more information call (404) 524.6541


—By Melanie Kowal, for Piedmont Review

Accident and coincidence are strong forces in Diane Hause's life and work. Things line up. Chance leads down unforeseen paths, toward new destinations and paintings that --- sort of --- paint themselves.

Her latest work, a large-scale installation at her studio/gallery, is, she says, her strongest experience of going with the flow.

"This is the most unconscious painting I've ever done," says the 53-year-old artist as she shows a visitor around the converted automobile manufacturing warehouse in the art-centric Castleberry Hill section of downtown Atlanta, where she lives and works.

The centerpiece is an 8-foot-by-16-foot painting that covers most of one wall. Other elements of the installation, scattered about the 2,200-square-foot gallery, include slabs of cypress, a hand-carved canoe and photographs of a North Carolina swamp. The painting incorporates an outsize re-creation of "The Great Wave" by 19th-century Japanese legend Hokusai. Called "Quest for the Echo's Source," the piece is an attempt to come to grips with the colossal, spirit-erasing tsunami that devastated the East last Christmas.

In the painting, an agonized mother and father drag their dead child from the waves, near a petal-bedecked branch of a flowering cherry tree and a halo-crowned lamb.

Pain and transcendence are bundled together in a work that, when Hause set out, promised to be mostly pain. "I'm trying to find redemption in the piece," she says. "In this world, it gets harder and harder to find redemption."

The artist approached the installation in an offbeat manner, starting with a canoe that appeared in a shallow dream one night.

"I woke myself up and thought, that must be significant. Maybe that's the hook."

Shortly thereafter, she ran into a real canoe, a hand-carved cypress craft at a sawmill in North Carolina where she was buying slices of ancient cypress trees. The canoe, the bark-clad cypress boards and her photos of the swampy North Carolina landscape near Wilmington all became part of the installation.

Then she began working on the painting, setting up 10 side-by-side plywood panels. Wondering what exactly she was going to begin with, Hause donned her smock, which had been hanging unused for eight months. In the pocket was a note from a friend, on a notecard printed with the famous Japanese image of a many-fingered blue and white wave.  That was it.

Other images also tumbled into the mix --- a rearing horse, a monarch butterfly, the planet Saturn, the Black Madonna.

Visitors to the gallery watched as the piece took shape and added their thoughts, inscribing slips of paper and placing them in the cypress canoe. One named Peggy wrote: "I sat and rocked in your chair and wept and do not understand, but bless you Diane for processing all this horror into absorbable tender loving universal beauty."

Hause frequently hosts benefits and arts events. She staged "Studio Sweepings" last November, convincing 110 area artists to contribute Ziploc-bag-size "leftovers" from their work to raise money for children in coffee-growing communities.

"After the tsunami I was overwhelmed," Hause says. She felt obliged to make some kind of art, but her studio had already been booked for three other shows.

"The last show left in March, and when the last piece of art was out, I washed the walls, painted the space, then the pressure was on. It was like writer's block. I asked myself, 'Is anything going to come?' Falling asleep, I told myself, 'After all these years, just let it come. Get out of the way and let it come.' "

"Quest for the Echo's Source" is on display through December at 3Ten Haustudio, 310 Peters St., Atlanta, from noon to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays or by appointment. 404-524-6541, www.haustudio.com.


—By Bo Emerson for the Journal-Constitution

Castleberry Hill exists between definitions, a mosaic of its seedy industrial past and its gallery-fabulous future. Gentrified but not really, a community but one without a supermarket or park, Castleberry Hill is more than the sum of its parts.

Nestled in the southwest corner of downtown Atlanta, within walking distance of Centennial Olympic Park, Castleberry Hill
is an overlap of turn-of-the-century industrialism and modern-day warehouse chic. Both stiletto-wearing artists and down-and-out homeless wander its main drag, Peters Street. Old warehouses with utilitarian names such as Swift & Company, Ty Stokes Cap and Gown, and Stable 1897 have been converted into high-priced galleries and residential lofts selling for upwards of $300,000.

"It's one of the best finds of the New South," boasts real estate agent Blaine Byers. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places since the '80s, Castleberry Hill has gotten a huge boost from artists interested in preserving the spacious buildings that create a continuous frontage along the downtown streets.

The work has paid off. Within a few square blocks, there are
now close to 20 loft developments and 10 galleries - making Castleberry Hill Atlanta's scaled-down answer to New York's Chelsea. But the neighborhood, a triangle-shaped wedge
bounded by Peter, Walker and Nelson streets, isn't nearly
as evolved as Manhattan's west side.

"Castleberry Hill is like a big smile with teeth missing," artist
and resident Diane Hause explains. "Fill in the gaps and it will shine." Hause has played no small role in Castleberry Hill's
rehab. In 1997, Hause, then a teacher at the Atlanta College
of Art, first stumbled upon the area while visiting a student's exhibition. She was shocked to see most of the flat-roofed warehouses boarded up. In some ways, Castleberry Hill
was a mirror of the nearby neighborhoods of Pittsburgh
and Mechanicsville, which had long ago succumbed to
high crime and the exodus of residents.

But despite Castleberry's rawness - or perhaps because
of it - Hause saw potential in the sheer size of the abandoned industrial buildings. She hired a real estate agent after her
interest was piqued by a century-old hardware store-turned-thrift shop owned by the Rev. Bill Tate, a colorful neighborhood fixture.

Unfortunately, the eccentric reverend, with white hair flowing past his beltline and a penchant for playing Wagner full-volume, refused to strike a bargain. Instead, Hause's real estate agent uncovered another gem, a 100-year-old auto warehouse across the street from the thrift store. The warehouse, like all the buildings in Castleberry Hill, needed work.

In fact, the entire back wall was missing; it was removed years ago so that mechanics could literally lift cars off the railroad
tracks into the shop and, once repaired, drive them out the
door. Once the wall was reconstructed, Hause had to wrangle
with a "thick molasses-like" substance that coated the existing walls, the result of decades of accumulated car exhaust. It took just over a year for 3TEN Haustudio to morph into the alternative art exhibition space its owner had imagined. Hause then built a 2,000-square-foot condo above the 4,000-square-foot studio,
which she shares with an acupuncturist, so that she could
not only work but live in Castleberry Hill.

In Hause's case, timing turned out to be key. Months after she moved to Castleberry Hill, developers swooped in and purchased most of the freestanding buildings. Development finally began in earnest a couple years ago. But it was not the developers who ultimately put Castleberry Hill on the map. Big-name visual
artists such as Carolyn Carr, Michael Gibson and Christopher Hauk moved their studios into the area's converted warehouses, followed by gallery owners hailing from as far as Athens. Last year, the Marcia Wood Gallery surprised its well-heeled patrons when it moved its swanky Buckhead operation to Castleberry Hill.

Monthly art strolls between galleries now draw an astounding
900 people. Mary Stanley, a curator who typically does business with uptown Atlanta galleries and is currently hosting her first
two exhibitions in Castleberry Hill, says she's urged patrons to explore the neighborhood because she has "found high quality
in every single one of these galleries." "The people who have chosen to live here are people I want to hang around," Stanley says. According to Anne Irwin, owner of Buckhead's Anne Irwin Fine Art, Castleberry Hill is an area "full of wonderful surprises."

These days, Hause confidently states, "in the next year or two [Castleberry Hill] will be ready to pop." In fact, Castleberry Hill is "popping" already. Just stop by Slice, the local pizza joint, on a Saturday night and try to get near the bar.

—By Rebecca Ford, for Creative Loafing

YOU MAY NOT HAVE NOTICED, but a few weekends ago the edgier galleries in town knocked themselves out for a rare visit from the annual convention of the College Art Association.

The academicians came and went in a whirlwind of events, but "Gender in Motion," the juried show of the Women's Caucus for Art, is still on view through Tuesday at 3Ten Haustudio, Diane Hause's studio/gallery space in Castleberry.

The show's of more than academic interest. The WCA was born during the ferment of first-generation feminism. So you may find it educational that so many women remain engaged in the problems of being a female artist — and just of being a woman — without fitting into stereotypes. Many of the WCA's early feminists have now raised a generation of children, and their art shows us that feminism can be a family value.

Distinguished artist Emma Amos selected a handful of works
from hundreds of submissions. She assembled a show that includes everything from Marya Roland's humorous take on fat
to a delicately symbolic sculpture by Gerry Sattele that could be interpreted as dealing with topics from heartbreak to major surgery.

This viewer-friendly show has already appealed to many visitors who would never seek out a show featuring "women's art," and should help more people realize that the members of the
Women's Caucus for Art are diverse and independent.

THE 411: "Gender in Motion." Noon-6 p.m. Thursday-Saturday and Tuesday. 310 Peters St. S.W., Atlanta. 404-523-6541

— Jerry Cullum for the Journal-Constitution

YOU ARE INVITED to an art party Saturday night at 3Ten Haustudio in Castleberry Hill. See Seaberg Acrobatic Poetry and other performances. Listen to jazz, blues, rock and bluegrass by local bands. Chow down on pizza from Slice and salads from Ria's Bluebird.

It ought to be a good time, but this is also a party with a purpose. Artist Diane Hause, who frequently opens her studio for benefits,
is raising money for Coffee Kids, a nonprofit organization that helps children who live in coffee-growing communities around the world. She's hit upon a novel idea.

Hause gave artists a 12-by-16-inch plastic coffee bag and asked them to fill it with stuff around their studios or to make a piece that would fit in the bag. She will sell the bags, displayed throughout the studio, in a silent auction during the party. It turns out this
was just the kind of challenge to get the creative juices going. More than 100 artists responded.

Here are some examples:

STUDIO SWEEPINGS: Some of them took the title seriously
and filled their bags with such items as paint-can lids, sawdust, ceramic shards and sandpaper --- artfully composed into little assemblages.

MINI ARTWORK: Some made 12-by-16-inch artworks, from paintings to metal sculptures. Victoria Martin-Gilly created a goodie bag, filled with several small pencil drawings.

CELEBRITY SOUVENIRS: Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls contributed a bag that includes a harmonica, a hand-written
play list and guitar picks.

FUNCTIONAL ART: Mary Ann Martino crocheted part of a scarf and wrote a poem about its colors, along with an offer to finish the scarf for the buyer.

CONCEPTUAL ART: Mark Wolfe enclosed an American flag
that was made in China in a comment on outsourcing.

THE 411: Suggested donation: $5. 5-11 p.m. Saturday. Silent auction ends at 9 p.m. Bids start at $10. 3Ten Haustudio, 310 Peters St., downtown Atlanta. 404-524-6541.

WHAT IT IS: Diane Hause's "The Presence of Absence" is an installation at her space, 3Ten Haustudio, in the Castleberry arts district.

BACKGROUND: It seems to be the season for rocking chair art. Hause, an artist and alternative space operator, wanted to create
an installation that would evoke memory of times past and persons no longer present. She came up with a dozen white rocking chairs, arranged in a white gallery space, behind a white curtain.

She then arranged a grid of rocking chair drawings outside the installation so visitors could mark their presence. The piece is completed by a soundtrack of what Hause describes as waves crashing, wind chimes, seagulls and Yoko Ono.

THE MESSAGE: Hause's chairs are meant to be sat in and gently rocked while hearing evocative sounds to create a feeling of more than just restfulness. You may be surprised what past experiences come into your mind. These empty chairs in a mostly empty room contain much more than meets the eye.

HOW TO SEE IT: Phone ahead. Hause can have the installation operating in a matter of minutes, but only if she's on the premises. You should also allow time to fully indulge in the experience.

Her art feels as though the artist is using her work in a fundamental way, like crop circles on the ground or cave
paintings on a wall, in hopes of communicating with someone
or something larger than herself.

Diane Hause is one of those Castleberry pioneers. In 1999, she converted an automotive warehouse in the downtown neighborhood into a studio/exhibition space, which now features a 20-year retrospective of her multifarious work.

Through Jan. 31. 310 Peters St. 404-524-6541

— Catherine Fox for the Journal-Constitution

An added bonus was that the tour coincided with several art shows. Skot Foreman opened his door to show off his Eschers. Kubatana gallery had a temporary space showing an apple painting that looked like Magritte on 'roids, which I loved.

The giant garage door on Diane Hause's studio was open, revealing some great photography (Kathryn Kolb's "Moon With Thistles" was my favorite), and her brother Robert was making Mission furniture. I tried to look up the definition of Mission furniture and I found: "Mission furniture speaks of the quality
of years gone by, joined with today's lifestyles."

Hey, Diane, I finally spelled your name correctly!

— Andisheh Nouraee, for Creative Loafing

This is easiest to see in the show's title work, which overlaps the sacred texts of the three religions that claim Jerusalem (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), but in some ways the entire exhibition
is a single installation, separate artworks themselves unified
by the large wall text, from the Sufi poet Rumi, that opens
the show, a call for honest encounter. Or, as the Jewish writer
Martin Buber put it, "All real living is meeting."

Hause has the good sense to bring it all together while keeping
it a little bit apart, so that this show isn't an indiscriminate
mush of religious symbolism. But she tries to suggest
that the different paths, including simple cosmic wonder,
can be put into conversation that reveals, in fact, convergence.

— Jerry Cullum, for the Journal-Constitution

Bounds' Castleberry neighbor Diane Hause is another gallery-occupant whose curating suggests a kind of grassroots activism.

Like Bounds, Hause essentially invites the world into the welcoming and intimate space of her home in order to reach
across the socioeconomic and cultural divides that can
characterize life in Atlanta.

Her serene 3Ten Haustudio (www.haustudio.com) gallery is the downstairs in her spectacular three-story live/work space. Hause has featured numerous shows of her own work at the 2,400-square-foot Haustudio, where openings become multimedia events that combine musical performances, spoken word, ethnic cooking and fundraising for causesfrom Sudan's "Lost Boys," to Navajo weavers and Afghan women.

Hause blends Buddhism, Christianity and Islam in her mixed-media collages and paintings of "A Convergence of Faiths" through June 14. The artist gives her exploratory, spiritual treatment to an idea that weighs heavily on many minds since Sept. 11, of how to wrest meaning from an often ugly, chaotic, war-torn world.

"Wander through. Eat some strawberries." That's how Diane Hause greeted me when I arrived at her 3Ten Haustudio Galleryfor her show, A Convergence of Faiths. I don't think she meant it that way, but that's great advice for life, too.

— Andisheh Nouraee, for Creative Loafing