Thursday, August 8, 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.

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.

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.

Once he has decided on a specific subject, he makes sure that it is well studied. Once he has stored it in his mind, it goes through a process of being disassembled into parts and then reassembled again in a new image. He says that the roots of his work are in his memory and are colored by his imagination.

His process involves first using pure washes of color to create light and dark areas. This is in the style of the Asian masters and enables him to distill the essence from the scene. He then he has a composition on which to build depth. He then creates this depth, using a more impressionist European style.

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.

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.

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.




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