News Detail
Alumni Highlight: Christian Haub '70
Alumnus Christian Haub '70 attended the Ransom School from 1965-1968, when classes were known as "forms." He has been an artist since the 1970s, exhibiting internationally since the 1980s.
RE: What years did you attend The Ransom School?
CH: I was the class of 1970 and attended 1-4 forms.
RE: What were your extracurricular activities when at Ransom?
CH: I played varsity tennis from first through fourth forms, and I ran cross country.
RE: Where did you attend college?
CH: I graduated from Princeton University.
RE: What was your major?
CH: Art History.
RE: What was your first ever job?
CH: I was a tennis professional in Freeport, on Grand Bahama Island in 1971.
RE: Tell us about your art.
CH: I started painting seriously in 1974 and by 1980, I was very excited by the kinds of abstraction I had discovered. In 1983 and 1984 I spent a year and a half painting and looking at art in Rome and all over Italy.
CH: I started painting seriously in 1974 and by 1980, I was very excited by the kinds of abstraction I had discovered. In 1983 and 1984 I spent a year and a half painting and looking at art in Rome and all over Italy.
In the mid '80s I was making oil paintings that were underpainted with either red or green and then painted over with black and white. One day I saw precut red and green squares of acrylic, so I took some home. The first time that paint hit the plastic surface, it exploded. Soon afterward, I did a show which turned out to be of my last oil paintings and of my first paintings using acrylic on acrylic.
RE: What are “Floats”?
CH: Floats are plexiglass constructions that are looked through as well as at. I’ve been making the plexi Floats since 1990. For the sake of simplicity I’ll refer to the cast acrylic sheet that I use as “plexi.” When I paint I try to make the paintings as vivid and full of light as the plexi pieces. Plexi achieves its luminosity effortlessly.
My plexi is a sheet of cast acrylic, which, starting out as a liquid, is then cut into pieces and bonded together. I am free to move the parts around as much as I like before fixing them, like a collage. I see the works as like fresco and watercolor – color cast onto and illuminated by the ground.
It wasn’t long before the plexi panels that I was painting on began to look worth doing in themselves, without paint. I stopped using paint from one day to the next for about two years and began making the Floats, first showing them in L.A.
By 1992 I was painting again, but the paintings came directly out of my experience with the Floats, which are always rectilinear.
I can’t call the Floats paintings because I don’t use paint, but they hang on the wall and come from painting, I think they could be called “shallow reliefs.” When my wife, Vera Miljkovic, photographs them she has the problem of where to focus. There is the physical surface of the plastic, and then there is the colored light cast behind it on the wall. You look both at and through the works.
RE: What is your favorite part of your job?
CH: I am a painter, an artist. I love everything about it.
RE: Who was your favorite teacher at Ransom?
CH: That's easy. Geoffrey Pietsch. He always went the extra mile for his students.
Of course, we had other terrific teachers: Michael Stokes, Dennis Geesey, Morgan Kelly, John Sullivan, John Bell, John Moss, Wallace Cole and Betty Smith! A golden age.
RE: What song (or album) did you listen to non-stop the year you graduated?
CH: The White Album, Tommy.
RE: What do you do in your spare time?
CH: Spare time?
RE: What motivates you to get out of bed in the morning?
CH: I keep musician's hours. I don't get out of bed in the morning. When I do? Money.
RE: What is one of your favorite quotes?
CH: Today? From the painter, Michael Goldberg: “I require music when I'm working, and that's about it. I like to play the music so loud I can drown the world out.”
RE: What book are you currently reading?
CH: I am re-reading Beyond Piety, by the brilliant light, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe.
RE: What is something that your teachers would be surprised to learn about you?
CH: That I often remember all of them.
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Founded in 1903, Ransom Everglades School is a coeducational, college preparatory day school for grades 6 - 12 located on two campuses in Coconut Grove, Florida. Ransom Everglades School produces graduates who "believe that they are in the world not so much for what they can get out of it as for what they can put into it." The school provides rigorous college preparation that promotes the student's sense of identity, community, personal integrity and values for a productive and satisfying life, and prepares the student to lead and to contribute to society.