Carol Hausser is a highly regarded Salem, Oregon, painter and former college art teacher who has taken watercolor painting to new heights of sophistication and virtuosity. Hausser was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 1949 but spent most of her childhood in Bozeman, Montana, where her father taught philosophy at Montana State University and her mother was a homemaker. In high school Hausser benefited from study under Ray Campeau, an inspirational art teacher at Bozeman Senior High School, and when she decided to attend college, she enrolled in the School of Art at the University of Washington in Seattle with the intent of becoming an artist.
At the University of Washington in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hausser had an opportunity to study with some of the most dynamic and exciting painters and printmakers at work in Seattle at the time: Glen Alps, Chuck Close, Michael Dailey, Paul Ripley Jenkins, Bob Jones, Spencer Mosley, Richard Proctor, and Bill Ritchie, among others. She received her BA degree in 1971, and after spending two years on the East Coast—as her husband, the painter Rob Bibler, completed his MFA degree—they moved to Salem, Oregon, when he accepted a teaching position at Chemeketa Community College.
Hausser took graduate courses in color theory and design at the University of Oregon in 1979–80, but from 1976 to 2016 she served on the art faculty at Chemeketa Community College, where she taught courses in drawing, figure drawing, and watercolor painting, and occasionally served as art program chair. Over the years, Hausser has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the region, and her works can be found in the collections of Chemeketa Community College, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Microsoft Corporation, and the State of Oregon, among many others.
Image: Carol Hausser. Photo by William Bragg.