James Havard US, 1927-2020
"Art over the centuries has been engaged in exploring and producing beauty, and more recently has had a vexed relationship with that concept. My work unabashedly aims to achieve aesthetic beauty by evoking a primal fascination with the allure of gold and the aesthetic pleasure of color, pattern and texture — as evident throughout human visual history. My process involves making bold aesthetic statements only to soften them with a multitude of layers, which adds to the eventual complexity of the surface. This has the effect of indicating a passage of time on the canvas itself."
- James Havard
James Havard was a American painter and sculptor. He was a pioneer of Abstract Illusionism in the 1970s. In the 1980s he changed his style into a form of Abstract Expressionism influenced by Native American and tribal cultures as well as by Outsider Art. Drawing inspiration from Outsider and tribal art, Havard stands within a tradition that includes such notables as Paul Gaugin, Cy Twombly, Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joseph Beuys.
James Havard's works have been exhibited internationally and are included in several important museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of Art in New York City and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California.
