Wednesday, August 7, 2013

The Enticing Works Of Max Hayslette

By Nita McKinney


Max Hayslette was born in the United States in 1930 and showed artistic promise from an early age. He held his first one man show when he was still a teenager, hanging his paintings in the windows of a local furniture store. His classical training only came later, when he moved to Illinois to attend the Art Institute of Chicago.

While he was there, he was exposed to the Bauhaus movement. This movement was to have a profound influence on modern design and many of its driving personalities were living and working in Chicago when he arrived there. This movement had an influence on him he never forgot.

There was a twenty year period when he did not focus on fine art at all. Instead he worked as an interior and industrial designer. When he returned to the field of fine art, he did so with great success and his career as an artist has since brought him renown worldwide.

His habit is to travel to the location that he wants to paint and take photographs. He also makes sketches and most importantly, records the colors. He feels that each place has a unique temperature. This is seen in his paintings of the hills of Tuscany, glowing with deep reds, golds and green or St. Tropez with its cool, blue hues. We feel inspired by the beauty of these locations, as seen through his eyes.

He chooses a subject, studies it well, then disassembles it and reassembles to create his own images. He says the root from which his works grow is memory colored by imagination. The essence of a subject is more important to him than the detail and this ability to see the abstract in a subject is one of his great strengths.

He begins his paintings by focusing on the areas of light and dark. He is influenced in this by the Asian artists who are able to reduce forms to simple abstracts. Once he has this composition of foreground, middle ground and background, he can start to think about adding depth and color. In adding these elements, his style becomes more impressionistic in nature.

He succeeds in capturing the beauty of a natural landscape, sometimes with extremely vivid detail and at other times in a way that seems to capture more the way we remember and feel than the way a camera would capture a fixed image. This is why he does not regard himself as an impressionist or a realist. He has a style all his own which he regards as a kind of updated impressionism.

He now lives in Kingston, Washington, overlooking Puget Sound. He loves to paint in silence and this stillness and timelessness is reflected in his paintings. Those who love his works appreciate their romantic, almost spiritual quality.

This artist has produced a wide array of enticing landscapes that are to be seen in many corporate and private collections around the world. His works are also sold in poster form, while many galleries and art stores carry his originals. He has also held many exhibits of his work through the years. The Max Hayslette Archives Collection is housed at West Virginia University.




About the Author:



No comments:

Post a Comment