Ken Behm and Max Hayslette
Featuring Original Oils,
Limited Edition Giclees, and KB Exclusive Prints
Sentinels of Autumn
Tuscany in October
Old Mill with Boats
Evening on the Dordogne
Song of Tuscany
Tuscan Gold
Annecy Suite: "Little Canal" and "Blue Boat"
“The combination of a long dance between memory and imagination is the root form which my images grow.”
Max Hayslette’s love of travel is second only to his love of art. His works have been influenced in various ways by the far corners of the world he has visited. He was so taken by the architecture he saw in Japan that he was moved to design a Japanese style studio. Nestled among the trees in a rural area of Puget Sound, his studio is surrounded by the things he loves most: a series of ponds with koi swimming in them, waterfalls, footbridges and a teahouse for private meditation.
Mr. Hayslette likes to work on-site for his paintings whenever possible. He takes photos, renders sketches and creates color notes. He takes particular care in recording atmospheric color temperatures. Mr. Hayslette feels that different areas of the world have very distinct color temperatures. His intensely warm color palette and sense of dramatic lighting transports the viewer to familiar, at times surreal, destinations.
A world-renowned landscape artist, Mr. Hayslette’s work reflects a gentle and spiritual quality. Hayslette considers himself a romantic artist, one who seeks to give his works a warm and gentle spiritual quality. For him, the essence and spirituality of his subject are more important than detail. He finds that he can grasp this spiritual essence more completely when his subject is illumined by the dawn twilight, halfway between light and dark. “Painting is a silent medium, and well suited to exploring the ethereal qualities of early morning light, before the sounds of the day invade the scene,” Hayslette states.
His quest to see the landscape as a flat composition of light and dark stems from his love of Asian woodcuts. Mr. Hayslette believes that the Asian artist is able to reduce a subject to its simplest abstract form. His strongest attribute as a painter is his ability to see the abstract in his subject. The skeleton of each of his paintings is black and white, two-dimensional abstracts. This gives him the composition, the weights and balances on which he later hangs the more traditional elements of the subject. After the composition is formed and the painting divided into its planes, foreground, middle ground, and background, then a color palette is considered that will further enhance the storytelling of the painting.
Born in Rupert, West Virginia, Hayslette had his first one-man show in 1946. He studied at the American Academy, continuing on to the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied with Alexander Archipenko and Egon Weiner. Today he is represented in over three hundred private, corporate and public collections, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Union Carbide, The Ford Motor Company, and IBM. He also has had numerous exhibitions across the United States at the Seattle Art Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and Findlay Gallery, Chicago, to name a few.