Paul Havas

Paul Havas was born in 1940 in Orange, New Jersey.[2] He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in 1962 and went on to earn a master's degree from the University of Washington in 1965.[3] He also studied at the Corcoran College of Art and Design and was a Max Beckmann fellow at the Brooklyn Museum School of Art.[2] Havas went back to teach painting and drawing at the University of Washington, Idaho State University, and at Stanford University.[4]

Grayland Light, 2010, by Paul Havas. Collection of Woodside/Braseth Gallery.

The subject of Havas' work changed throughout his life. In his early years, around 1970, while living on Capitol Hill in Seattle, Havas painted depictions of trucks.[5] Later in his career, he painted landscapes using oil on canvas.[6] Havas spent 14 years, from 1970 to 1984, living and painting on Fir Island, located in the Skagit Valley.[2][4] The subject of the work he painted there was his surroundings: the farmlands of the Skagit Valley, the Cascades to the East, and the San Juan Islands to the West.[7] His work in the Skagit Valley was influenced by his early training in abstract expressionism,[4] and although he did not identify himself as an impressionist, he concentrated on light and how it fell across the subject of his work.[8] Wesley Wehr described Havas's Skagit Valley landscapes as "filled with the diffuse light of spring and summer in the valley".[9] Some of Havas' paintings from this time were a part of the Northwest/New York Group Show at the Bayard Gallery in New York in 1980 and can be found in the Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, Washington.[2]

Upon moving back to Seattle in 1984, Havas began painting night cityscapes and urban northwest landscapes.[2] However, by 1993, around the time that he helped found the Northwest Figurative Artists' Alliance, he had resumed the creation of wilderness scenes, including both wide views and close-up depictions of specific elements of nature.[8][10] Between these cityscapes and wilderness scenes, Havas began shifting the perspective of his paintings indoors. The viewer of the painting sees both a piece of the inside of the house and the view of the landscape or cityscape through a window.[2] In a similar fashion, Havas also placed paintings within paintings, as seen in his work Piano and Painting, which features a painting of Lummi Island on the wall inside of a house. Lummi Island was a setting that Havas employed as he continued his work into the 2000s. His 2001 exhibition at the Woodside/Braseth Gallery, where his art was frequently displayed, included several paintings of Lummi Island.[7] He continued his work near his summer home by the mouth of Willapa Bay, painting landscapes in and around Oysterville, WA in the CDP of Tokeland, WA.[4][6]

Havas died at the age of 71 of pancreatic cancer on February 16, 2012.[4]

• Official Website
• Woodside/Braseth Gallery Website