Paint, Ref ined and Raw

The Mastery of James Havard

MASTER WORKS | by Laura Addison

James Havard’s work is often compared with that of Jean Dubuffet, whose painting is characterized by a raw, naive, and seemingly untrained style inspired by the art of children, mental patients, and prisoners—creative output that the French artist coined art brut. Dubuffet’s then-radical style, formulated during the years following World War II, was a conscious departure from European artistic traditions, a complete rejection of the Academy—and culture, for that matter. Similarly, Havard’s embrace of art brut (or outsider art), a style he transitioned to in the mid-1990s, marked his repudiation of an art marketplace that he felt had become formulaic and stale. His was a personal revolution aimed at reinventing not the art world, but himself.

Havard in his Santa Fe studio, 2003.

James Havard was born in 1937 in Galveston, Texas. His early art training was academic in nature, focusing on life drawing and realism at Sam Houston State University, in night classes at Atelier Chapman Kelly, and then at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1961–1965). Realism was the means by which he gained acceptance in art circles at the time, excelling at the Academy, exhibiting his work at student art shows, and even moonlighting as a technical illustrator to support himself. Ever the experimenter, however, Havard was by the late 1960s playing with abstract figuration, pop art, minimalism, and materials such as auto-body paint and vacuum-formed shapes.

By the late 1970s, living in New York City, Havard became known as the leading practitioner of what gallerist Louis K. Meisel termed “abstract illusionism,” a style of painting characterized by the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. Paintings such as Color Chart for Cane Garden Bay (1977) possess their own pictographic language of loosely scrawled lines, squirts of paint, X marks, and geometric elements that appear to jump forth from the canvas, an impression accentuated by painted shadows. Havard’s system of symbols is an enigmatic form of writing familiar only to him. His reputation was cemented by various exhibitions at galleries and museums that established abstract illusionism as a veritable art movement.

The boom years of the 1980s were good to Havard. However, not one to become complacent with his growing success, he began to move his paintings toward a darker palette and deeper expressionism. A work such as Peyote Wall (1982) epitomizes this transitional style. Figuration and references to indigenous cultures, particularly influenced by his passion for collecting Native American objects, appeared sporadically in his work while he was in New York, but once Havard moved to Santa Fe in 1989, they became more common currency. His New Mexico History Page series, for example, incorporated ethnographic imagery in the form of collaged reproductions. The play of illusion and reality became all the more evident with this juxtaposition of paint and photograph.

In turning to the elemental quality attributed to outsider art and ethnographic objects, Havard was following a well-worn, though problematic, path negotiated by Dubuffet, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and André Breton, among others. Through their fixation on tribal cultures and the marginalized of society, the European avant-garde sought a return to origins, true creativity, and authenticity. Abandoning his early painting successes, Havard seemed to be searching for a more authentic voice that was unsullied by market demand. Here again we find parallels with Dubuffet, who in his lifetime sought liberation from cultural norms and historical precedents. The irony, of course, is that each artist found his authentic voice by rejecting the art establishment while working within it and deriving recognition and monetary success from it.
Although in retrospect Havard’s shift to a more raw, expressive, and unmediated style of painting was clearly a gradual process, the new style seemed in 1996 to be a sudden schism—a response to two health emergencies in five years, both near-death experiences. It was as if he was channeling Jean Dubuffet—or, more accurately, the outsider artists the Frenchman championed as original and authentic voices—through his paintings.

One could hardly conceive of two painting styles more disparate than the refined finish of Havard’s abstract-illusionist canvases and the raw, unrelenting, childlike hand of his art brut works. Yet further consideration suggests what it is that Havard’s two styles share: “intoxication,” such as that described by Dubuffet, with the tactility, sensuousness, and shape-shifting potential of paint. Early in his career, Havard made paint trick the eye with illusionism so convincing it left you with the impression that you could touch the object represented. In contrast, his later works make paint seize the emotions with the intensity and vigor of its handling. A characteristic painting, such as Woman in Drawing Room with Scorpion, consists of a central figure coarsely drawn or incised, often female, floating on a dense oil-and-wax matrix that is often black. Words may appear gouged into the thick, primordial substrate; when legible, they are cryptic at best. For Havard, unknown demons are purged through the act of painting, drawing, and incising. Sometimes the painting is completed with the ultimate stylistic paradox: an ornate, gilded frame. In this dark underworld—at times humorous, at times menacing—there is no more visual deception of dimensional space. In its place is an insistent flatness. And there is no effort at refinement. Instead there is pure automatism, spontaneity, and “mad intoxication.”

The naiveté of Havard’s expressionist paintings belies a mastery of the human form through rigorous academic training. And the crudeness of the surface and line—accomplished by combining oil and wax, using fingers and paintbrushes, and building up layers and then brutally incising those layers with screwdrivers—is a complete renunciation of the finish he sought as an abstract illusionist. Havard’s late work, in its apparent impulsiveness, seems to embody Dubuffet’s exhortation: “Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia!”

At 72, James Havard still creates nearly every day, despite a third near-death experience in 2006 that left him on a long road to recovery and reliant upon a wheelchair. Despite his physical limitations, Havard’s artistic practice continues along the same path. “I make beautiful messes,” he once quipped. The shape-shifting of his early years has given way to a firm conviction that his brand of art brut for the 21st century is his legacy to the art world.

From Fall/Winter 2009/2010 issue