Havard's career stands as one of the more unusual three-act trajectories in late twentieth-century American painting, academic realism, abstract illusionism, and a tribal-influenced expressionism rooted in his adopted Santa Fe, and the body of work it produced is unlike anything else made by his generation of American painters.
Havard came to art through the broad American university system rather than the New York avant-garde. His undergraduate degree in Texas gave him the foundational training; his subsequent years in Philadelphia placed him within one of the oldest and most disciplined American academic teaching environments. His early Philadelphia work was conducted in a representational idiom influenced by nineteenth-century French painters of the academic and pre-Impressionist traditions.
The shift to abstraction in the late 1960s and early 1970s was sudden and complete. He developed, almost simultaneously with a small group of contemporaries, a way of painting that took the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism and rendered it in trompe l'oeil shadow, so that brushstrokes, splatters, and drips appeared to float above the canvas surface. The approach was quickly recognized as a distinctive American development; the term Abstract Illusionism was coined for it, and Havard became one of its most visible practitioners, with major exhibitions and museum acquisitions following through the second half of the 1970s.
His move to New York placed him within the gallery system at the moment Abstract Illusionism was at its highest visibility, and his work entered major American collections in those years. But the Santa Fe trips that began at the end of the decade gradually opened a different direction. The high-desert light, the rock-art and pottery traditions of the surrounding Pueblo and Plains peoples, and the older folk and outsider art that he began collecting reshaped his visual world over the course of the 1980s, and by the time he made the permanent move to New Mexico his painting was already well into its third major phase.
The mature Santa Fe work was an expressionist idiom built from incised encaustic surfaces, raw and gestural mark-making, and a layered iconography drawn from Plains Indian, Navajo, Mimbres, and other Native and folk visual traditions. The wax-based medium allowed him to scratch directly into the surface of the painting, exposing earlier layers of color and giving the works a relief-like, almost archaeological quality that distinguished them sharply from both his earlier Abstract Illusionist phase and from anything else then being made in American painting.
He continued working in this vein for the rest of his life, building a major late body of paintings, drawings, prints, and small sculptural objects in close engagement with his Native American and outsider sources. His position today is that of one of the most original American painters of his generation, an artist whose three-phase career runs against the standard narrative of postwar abstraction and whose final Santa Fe work belongs both to the broader story of late twentieth-century American expressionism and to the particular tradition of artists who have remade themselves around the Southwestern landscape and its cultures.