James Hayward Dead: West Coast Painter of Thick Monochromes Dies at 82

James Hayward, West Coast Painter of Thick Monochromes, Dies at 82

James Hayward, an American painter whose dense monochrome canvases earned him a devoted following among artists, died on April 16 at age 82. A brief obituary posted by his studio over the weekend confirmed the news.

Hayward was never the most widely recognized figure to emerge from the postwar period, but his work carried unusual weight within artist circles. Mike Kelley once described him as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters,” a judgment that reflects the esteem in which Hayward was held by peers who responded to the rigor and oddity of his practice.

Born in San Francisco in 1943, Hayward studied at San Diego State University before completing graduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1969. He later explained that he was relieved to discover in college that an artist did not need to draw people. That freedom helped shape a career that moved away from figuration and toward increasingly stripped-down abstraction.

From the mid-1970s onward, Hayward largely made monochrome paintings, but his surfaces resisted the polished finish often associated with that mode. Instead of smooth, even fields, he left the paint thick and chunky, giving the works a tactile, almost stubborn physicality. In a 2012 exhibition at Los Angeles’s Richard Telles Fine Art, Artforum noted that his paint, “allegedly applied in the dark,” still produced a surprising range of variation. Hayward himself described the work with characteristic dry wit: “People ask what does that mean—you know, lay people? I say, well basically I make one-color paintings of basically nothing.”

Before that long monochrome period, Hayward painted works divided into two color fields split down the middle. He eventually abandoned that structure, saying, “I realized that I never again wanted to paint on this side or that side of any more god damn lines.” What followed were paintings he called “automatic,” aligning them with Surrealist ideas of art made by surrendering conscious control.

Although Sidney Janis Gallery in New York was among the first commercial spaces to show him, Hayward’s solo exhibitions were concentrated on the West Coast. San Francisco’s Modernism gallery presented more than 10 one-person exhibitions of his work, and in recent years his paintings appeared at Roberts Projects, the Pit gallery, and Miles McEnery Gallery. His work is now held by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles.

For much of his career, Hayward worked on a horse farm in Moorpark, where he continued painting into later life and wrote Indiscretions, a book of autobiographical anecdotes. Asked about the title, he offered a line that suits the rest of his career: “Discretion is the better part of valor, but indiscretion is the better part of adventure.”