James Havard was a pioneering figure of American Abstract Illusionism in the 1970s and one of the most distinctive Santa Fe painters of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a Texas-born artist whose career moved from academic realism through trompe l'oeil abstraction into a deeply personal idiom built around Native American imagery, encaustic surfaces, and incised mark.
James Pinkney Havard (June 29, 1937 – December 15, 2020) was an American painter and sculptor, born in Galveston, Texas, and one of the leading figures of the Abstract Illusionist movement of the 1970s. He earned his BS from Sam Houston State College in 1959 and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1961 to 1965, where he was initially trained in a representational tradition rooted in nineteenth-century European painting. His early Philadelphia work was strongly realist; the radical change of direction came in the early 1970s, when he developed the idiom for which he is now best known, paintings in which abstract gestural marks, drips, and brushstrokes were rendered with shadows and trompe l'oeil illusion to appear as if floating in three-dimensional space above the canvas.
He moved to New York in 1977 and began making the regular trips to Santa Fe in 1978 that would eventually lead to his permanent move to New Mexico in 1989. The Santa Fe years produced the third and final phase of his career, in which he absorbed the visual languages of Plains Indian, Navajo, and Mimbres cultures and worked increasingly in encaustic, a wax-based medium whose surface he could incise to give the painting a carved, luminous quality. His work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, and other major institutions.