I was recently offered a marvelous painting by James Hayward (American,
b. 1943) for one of my clients and I immediately started drooling – mind you,
not for the asking price, but for the rich, lathery, scrummy impasto of the
works. Admittedly I was hungry since the
delightful creamy medium reminded me of icing on a cupcake! Wonder who has a
sweet tooth?
Because I saw merit in the work, I started researching Hayworth and
was immediately struck and reminded at how we’re all affected by our
environment. You see, Hayward’s body of
work initially consisted of mirror-slick monotone canvases and it wasn’t until
his study in Japan in 1982 that his present oeuvre
started taking shape. It’s there he
developed an interest for the expressionistic and spontaneous technique of
calligraphy that he geniously started applying to his single-color canvases to
produce what we now identify as his signature style.
What one can appreciate in the examples shown here is the range of
energetic markings and vibrant colors the artist uses, sometimes even inventing
new ones in the process.
For example, in his Chromachord
series (mustard colored above), the artist worked 4 pure and saturated colors on
the surface of his canvas to produce a 5th. The resulting 5th was more like dog
puke and even Hayward admits that this series was somewhat of a failure, as it
did not achieve its intention. He say’s “these paintings parallel our reality;
excess to the point of collapse”. Yet even these share the “wall power” that
the more pure-colored canvases have.
Recently deceased artist Mike Kelley – according to the NYTimes “one
of the most influential artists of the last 25 years” – was quoted in 2005 as
saying that in his estimation “Hayward is one of the few truly important West
Coast painters, yet he is surprisingly little known outside of the area … he
has nothing in common with the painters who came before him … and nothing in
common with those that came after him ... Hayward has always followed his own
subtle and unique path.” I could not
agree more with him.
image credits: Modernism Gallery, San Francisco who represents the artist. (top to
bottom) – James Hayward,
Abstract Diptych #12,
2010, 15 x 22 in., oil on canvas on wood panels | Absolute 27x21, Manganese Violet, 1989, oil and wax on canvas and
wood panel | Asymmetrical Chromachord 10,
2009, 44 x 33 in., oil on canvas on wood panel | Absolute 55x46 Cobalt Green, 1989, oil and wax on wood panel.
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