James Hayward, a West Coast painter whose abstractions earned him a loyal cult following among artists, died on April 16. He was 82, according to a brief obituary posted by his studio over the weekend.
Hayward may not be among the most well-known names to emerge from the postwar period, but many artists knew and loved his work. Mike Kelley, for example, once praised him as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters.”
His process was marked by a certain eccentricity that differentiated his art from a lot of similar work. From the mid-1970s onward, Hayward largely produced monochrome abstractions. But where many single-color canvases from the era were characterized by the smooth, even application of paint, Hayward purposefully left his materials chunky and thick.
Referring to the phrase “monochrome abstraction,” Hayward told Artillery of his work, “People ask what does that mean—you know, lay people? I say, well basically I make one-color paintings of basically nothing.”
A positive Artforum review of an exhibition at Los Angeles’s Richard Telles Fine Art in 2012 noted that Hayward’s paint “allegedly applied in the dark, offered a surprising degree of variety.”
In the period preceding the monochromes, Hayward had predominantly created paintings composed of two expanses of color that were divided down the middle. But, he said, “I realized that I never again wanted to paint on this side or that side of any more god damn lines.” Thus followed a prolonged period of making paintings that he termed “automatic,” aligning them with Surrealist art that was supposedly produced by yielding all intentionality to the inner workings of the mind.
Born in San Francisco in 1943, Hayward attended San Diego State University. “I wasn’t good at drawing people,” he said of his undergraduate education. “I was glad to discover at college that you didn’t have to draw people to be an artist.” He went on to study in the University of California, Los Angeles’s graduate program, completing his education there in 1969.
Work by James Hayward from a 2024 exhibition at the Pit.
Alan Shaffer Photography
While New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery was among the first to commercial spaces to give him a commercial exhibition, nearly all of his solo shows have been held on the West Coast, with San Francisco’s Modernism gallery having given him more than 10 one-person exhibitions. In recent years, Hayward’s art has increasingly appeared in blue-chip settings: LA’s Roberts Projects and the Pit gallery, as well as New York’s Miles McEnery Gallery, have staged exhibitions of his art in the past decade.
His work is now held by institutions across the US, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.
For much of his career, Hayward made his art on a horse farm in Moorpark, where he painted well into his later years and wrote a book of autobiographical anecdotes called Indiscretions. Asked about the title, Hayward told Flaunt, “Discretion is the better part of valor, but indiscretion is the better part of adventure.”
