James Hayward, a San Francisco-born abstract painter whose heavily textured monochrome works made him a distinctive presence in California art for decades, has died at 82.
His studio announced in an Instagram post Thursday, April 16, that Hayward “transitioned peacefully this morning.”
Born Sept. 22, 1943, in San Francisco, Hayward spent much of his life in Los Angeles and later lived in Moorpark, where he worked on a horse farm.
Across a career that stretched more than four decades, Hayward developed a reputation for paintings that were both restrained and intensely physical. His best-known works used dense layers of oil paint and repeated diagonal strokes to build ridged, meditative surfaces that explored color, gesture and the material force of paint itself.
Roberts Projects, which has shown his work, said Hayward’s practice evolved from flatter “automatic” paintings in the 1970s to the thick monochrome abstractions that came to define his later work.
Hayward studied at San Diego State University and UCLA before earning a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington in 1972. His work was shown at major institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which holds his “Automatic Painting” from 1979-80 in its collection.
He also taught at several institutions, including ArtCenter College of Design and UCLA, influencing generations of younger artists.
Over the years, Hayward received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.
The artist Mike Kelley once described him as “one of the few truly important West Coast painters.” William Turner Gallery said two of Hayward’s paintings are included in its current group exhibition, “Surface Tension.”
A cause of death was not disclosed.
This article originally published at James Hayward, influential California abstract painter, dies at 82.
