James Hayward, the West Coast painter who dedicated his career to the physical weight of color, died on April 16 at the age of 82. Though he lacked the household name recognition of some of his postwar contemporaries, Hayward occupied a vital, almost venerated position among fellow artists. Mike Kelley once described him as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters,” a sentiment echoed by a loyal following that valued his stubborn commitment to the materiality of his medium.
Hayward’s transition to the monochrome abstractions that defined his legacy was born of a specific frustration. In his early career, he worked with canvases divided into two colors, but eventually found the boundary between them intolerable. “I realized that I never again wanted to paint on this side or that side of any more god damn lines,” he once remarked. This pivot led him toward a singular focus on the single-color canvas, yet his work stood apart from the flat, clinical surfaces of traditional minimalism.
Instead of smooth applications, Hayward’s monochromes were thick and textural—chunky expanses of paint that asserted their own three-dimensional presence. He famously described his work as “one-color paintings of basically nothing,” a self-deprecating summary that belied the complexity of his process. Reports of him painting in the dark suggested a desire to remove the visual ego from the act, allowing the physical variety of the material to dictate the final form. In doing so, he transformed the “nothing” of the monochrome into a profound study of substance.
With reporting from ARTnews.
Source · ARTnews
