Statement
Emotions are where my paintings, sculptures and prints originate. Abstraction and expressionism manifest through a bold use of color, texture, and patina. I am a painter whose artistic praxis foundationally is painting. Working in wood for the past 45 years it only recently became apparent that I create my paintings as I built houses.
Wood panels became the grounds for my paintings in 2010 whilst teaching a theater set design and construction course at Chabot Las Positas college. I created wooden cradles, rudimentarily crafted to act as grounds for layers of paint applied throughout the semester. The resultant works were then distressed, dragged across concrete and gouged until an aesthetic balance was present in the compositions.
Painting as both theorem and meditation lead the viewer into my world of capturing moments in time that subsume both the ethereal and the cerebral experiences of art.
Wood is the ideal ground as I craft and manipulate it into a primal form of a square. Then begins the layering of gesso and acrylic paint.
Having explored silkscreen printing, linoleum printing and collagraphy in graduate school, the desire to craft the flattest surface to paint on required defining a unique style of sanding the surface that is often assumed to be encaustic painting.
My paintings allude to portals into my abstract expressionist aesthetic that punctuates the viewers experience somewhere in the center of their chests. My abstract sculptures are extensions of my need to craft a ground, a dimensional space that the viewer is forced to physically engage in contrast to my paintings.
Bio
Raymond L. Haywood is an Afrofuturist Abstract Expressionist Painter and Sculptor in Berkeley California. He received his BFA from the University of California at San Diego and his MFA from San Francisco State University. He has over a decade of teaching experience from high school to community college. Raymond is currently a high school Construction Technologies Instructor at Freedom High School in Oakley CA. He is also a retired journeyman carpenter, knowledgeable in residential and commerical construction for the past four decades. He has taught a wide variety of art related subjects: painting, printmaking, theater set design and construction, textile design and Art History at the Junior College level.
Raymond is known for his abstract expressionist mixed-media paintings that often include paper collage, drawing, and hand-crafted paper stencils. His dynamic cowrie symbol paintings from 2020 explore the African Diaspora through variegated color and texture. He became a member of the art collective Mercury Twenty Gallery in downtown Oakland CA in 2021. His 2022 exhibition at the Mercury Twenty gallery in Oakland CA, “ENVy of Desire”, introduced his abstract expressionist sculptures. Utilizing vibrant color and patina rich surfaces illustrate Mr. Haywood’s signature painting style. Raymond is committed to Abstract painting and sculpture and has focused on these media for the past decade exclusively. His artwork evokes ethereal landscapes which resonate with his audience through emotions archived in our physical bodies.