8/09/2013

The Beautiful Works Of Max Hayslette

By Nita McKinney


Max Hayslette showed natural artistic talent long before he received any classical training. Born in West Virginia in 1930, he was only a teenager when he held a one man show of his paintings. Later he moved to Illinois where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago.

It was while in Chicago that he was exposed to the Bauhaus movement which had a significant influence on modern architecture and design. There were many followers of this movement living in Chicago while he was studying there. It was inevitable that he was influenced by these ideas that left a lasting impression on him.

Once he had finished studying, he went into industrial and interior design, working in these fiends for more than twenty years. During this time he did no serious fine art but once he decided to return to it, he did not look back. He has produced his fine paintings prolifically since then, becoming known throughout the world.

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 does not see himself as an impressionist. Sometimes he chooses to capture scenes in vivid detail. He does not see himself as a realist either, having a remarkable ability to see the abstract in every subject. He says that his style can perhaps be described as more of an updated impressionism.

Today he lives in Kingston, Washington. He continues to produce well loved works, with a stillness and timeless quality appreciated by his many admirers. As his work is not only available in galleries but may also be purchased in poster form, they are accessible and affordable to most art lovers.

His works appear in more than three hundred public and private collections, including The Rockefeller Foundation and Stanford University. The Max Hayslette Archives Collection is housed at the Morgantown campus of West Virginia University. He has also held numerous exhibitions over the years in various Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states and also exhibits in the Pacific Northwest where he lives today.




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