2nd chance: Illness helped James Havard focus on art

James Havard’s art has been influenced by both where he lived and the three times he nearly died.

Chatting at his studio, he refers to the “mighty nice skies” of Texas, where he grew up, and the auto body shop downstairs from his place in Philadelphia, where he studied art. The latter generated a “finish fetish” for the glow of automotive paint.

After two surgeries in the ’90s – an arterial bypass and a hernia operation with complications – he reinvented himself as an artist, Julie Sasse wrote in her 2006 Havard monograph. A brain hemorrhage in 2006 damaged his right side, and he was unable to walk. So he double-downed on his art.

“I felt more like working,” the 79-year-old said of the decade since the brain injury. “It gave me more energy. I forgot a lot of the other stuff – the other things in life – and I had only my work.”

So he devotes most days between his 9 a.m. breakfast and 6 p.m. dinner – maybe skipping lunch – to painting, and when the paint is speaking to him, he can create as many as three works in a day.

“I work when I feel like it, which is pretty must all the time,” he said. “I now have the freedom and appreciation of time. It was almost time to go, and you get a second chance.”

Havard has a one-man show at the Blue Streak Gallery, 1721 Delaware Ave., Wilmington, through July 16. Gallery owner Ellen Bartholomaus selected more than 50 “enchanting and charming and playful” paintings, with prices from $850 to $3,000. “James is passionate about his painting,” she wrote. “He pushes through his physical limitations to continue pursuing what he loves to do. Paint.”

He works from a one-bedroom unit in a senior living community in Westtown, Pennsylvania, that’s dominated by his paintings – more than 100 on the walls, and a few dozen in piles and propped up on flat surfaces – and his art supplies. He used to favor far-larger canvases, but his space and the wheelchair now limit him canvases that are often just 5 by 7 inches, 8 by 10 inches or slightly larger.

But those groupings – hung salon-style, almost touching – together become larger works. “I say someone could come in and buy a wall, and it would be one painting,” said ex-wife Dolly Bruni.

Havard was born in Texas in 1937 and drew in his free time, outside chores on the family farm. After graduating from college, he worked as a technical illustrator (including “a diagram of the first space john,” Sasse wrote) by day and created “large-scale abstract expressionist canvases at night.”

A full scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts brought him to Philadelphia in 1961. He used academy awards to absorb European culture in travel through the continent. He had his first one-man show in 1965 – dozens would follow – and started collecting Native American beadwork.

Over the years, he lived and worked in the Caribbean island of Tortola and New York City. His 1989 move to Santa Fe, New Mexico, “introduced loose, Dubuffet-like figures and the use of encaustic and collage into his previously nonobjective paintings,” Kathryn M. Davis wrote on www.artltdmag.com. He returned to the Delaware Valley in 2014, to be near Bruni and their son.

“Dad’s happier and more at peace now,” said Houston Havard, a Newark filmmaker.

Havard’s artistic career has had three major periods, first realism (landscapes and still lifes), then illusionism (“the thick paint seems to float off the canvas, with shadows,” he explained) and now figurative work, where the human figures may or may not be realistic. He has also sculpted.

After the brain injury – and the ensuing medical recovery, it took him two months to return to painting, Bruni recalled. Havard can partly thank talk show host David Letterman for connecting him to doctors. They had become friends after Letterman bought Havard’s Tribeca studio.

“I’m a lover of paint,” Havard said, referring to the rich texture and look of oil, his favorite medium.

But he no longer deals with the hassle of turpentine and mixing his own colors and instead relies on Bruni to buy oil sticks from Jerry’s Artarama in Wilmington. He compared oil sticks to giant crayons, harkening to his 1960s experimentation with crayon-inspired pop art. Bruni makes sure he has classic colors like burnt sienna and cadmium yellow.

"And then I’ll pick up fun colors,” she said.

Bruni also picks up his frames, from Michaels and Goodwill, and Havard often distresses them and coats them in a French gray to form a subdued structure for the bold and bright layers of oil sticks.

“The paint always suggests something to me,” Havard said in describing how he creates a piece, perhaps repainting parts a day or two later. But when the paint has dried and the work “feels right,” he declares it done.

In a similar way, titles just come up. He pointed to a painting with multicolored bubbles rising from a figure’s mouth. It’s a recurring image. “‘Talking in Color’ would be a good title,” he said.

Another recurring theme is having words on his paintings. “Dianthus pink” is on one in his home, drawn from the name of an oil stick. “Aw hush your face” appears on a Blue Streak piece, recalling a favorite saying from his Aunt Alicia.

“He never intellectualizes his work,” Bruni said. “It always comes from inside him. They’re figurative, a little primitive, but you can see what’s inside in his head. They’re really cool.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: James Havard’s one-man show “Salon Paintings”

WHERE: Blue Streak Gallery 1721 Delaware Ave., Wilmington

WHEN: Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. and Saturday 10 a.m.-4 p.m., through July 16

MORE INFORMATION: (302) 429-0506