James Havard     Untitled, 2015, Oil stick and pencil on board,  13"x11.5" framed

James Havard: I’m Still Here

Walking down the hallway to James Havard’s room you can follow the increasing paint spots on the carpet. His door sports not the usual plastic flowers and lace-framed photographs, but rather smudges and fingerprints of color. Havard paints here with his left hand, blind in his right eye and wheelchair bound after his stroke in 2006. The stroke left him in a five-week coma with months of rehabilitation, occurring shortly after his last exhibition with Allen Stone in NYC and release of his retrospective book designed by David Chickey of Santa Fe. Colored markers and plain paper were essential to his return; art and painting were and are his life.

He now works small; no brushes full of heavy oil or encaustic wax but rather his fingers painting with soft oil sticks, pencils used to draw and scratch his marks down to the board. In his developed Art Brut style, he continues to place his figures in an intense color field of unassociated space. Often disembodied floating faces directly gaze out to us. Striped and polka-dot clothing adorns legs and dresses of his fellow elders or staff. He paints every day. He is still here, sunshine on his little table surrounded by these people in his work.

-Catherine Eaton Skinner, 2019

James Havard     Untitled, 2014, Oil stick and pencil on board,  18"x15" framed

James Havard     Untitled, 2018, Oil stick and pencil on board,  17.5"x115" framed

James Havard     Untitled, 2012, Oil stick and pencil on board,  12.5"x10.5" framed

James Havard     Untitled, 2017, Oil stick and pencil on board,  18.5"x15.5" framed

About James Havard:

James Pinkney Havard was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1937. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in art from Sam Houston State College (now Sam Houston State University) in Huntsville, Texas, in 1959. From 1961 to 1965 he studied at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There he was influenced by realist painters Ben Kamihira and Hobson Pittman. His career can be divided into three broad periods: realism (1960s), abstract illusionism (1970s), and abstract expressionism with tribal and outsider influences (1980s and beyond). He moved to New York in 1977 and took frequent trips to Santa Fe, New Mexico, beginning in 1978. He moved to Santa Fe in 1989 where he continued to develop his style, ultimately freeing himself from all references to abstract illusionism. In 2006 Havard suffered a stroke but continues to paint. This well-trained artist who for many years was inspired by outsider art has become an outsider himself in the sense that he now paints with the constraints of a physical handicap. Due to Havard's limited mobility, his most recent works are small in scale, but "are nonetheless extremely powerful, perhaps even more so because the reduced format concentrates them." –John Dorfman, Art in Antiques Magazine (September, 2016)

James Havard's work is in the permanent collection of many museums around the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Stockholm, Sweden), Tucson Museum of Art (Arizona), and the Los Angeles County Museum (California).

James Havard     Untitled, 2017, Oil stick and pencil on board,  19.5"x17.5" framed

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RECEPTION: FRIDAY, OCTOBER 4 2019, FROM 6-8PM
THIS EVENT IS FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

627 WEST ALAMEDA STREET, SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO  505 / 988 5005