Bryan Haynes | Stories in Time

Bryan Haynes paints the historical landscape

By Elizabeth L. Delaney

Bryan Haynes, Portage de Sioux, acrylic, 24 x 30.

Bryan Haynes, Portage de Sioux, acrylic, 24 x 30.

This story was featured in the December 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art December 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

As kids growing up in small-town Missouri, Bryan Haynes and his brother would imagine traveling through time, visiting far-off people, places, and events forever out of their physical reach but attainable through stories learned and conjectured. These visions of the past never left Haynes. Today he recounts those stories through his contemporary lens, watching them materialize on canvas in rich pigments and nuanced details.

“I admire a lot of people who came before us,” Haynes says, and his work reflects that mindset in the historical subjects and tales that populate his canvases. Haynes grew up in Kirkwood, MO, surrounded by gently rolling hills and fertile riverbanks and forging a deep connection to the land and to those who lived and worked there over centuries. However, it wasn’t until he moved away and then returned years later that he could fully understand and appreciate this connection.

Bryan Haynes, Fiddle Creek Cowscape, acrylic, 14 x 60.

Bryan Haynes, Fiddle Creek Cowscape, acrylic, 14 x 60.

Haynes displayed an eagerness for making art from the time he was a small child and spent his days drawing. “I always had pencil in hand,” he remembers. As he grew, so did his penchant for drawing. His parents recognized his talent and encouraged him to develop it, enrolling him in life-drawing classes at the local community college while he was still in high school. Leaving class early some days might have made Haynes the envy of his schoolmates, but the larger benefit, by far, was the opportunity to advance his skills and further cement his desire to become an artist.

After high school, he felt called to further his studies out west. He was accepted to the prestigious Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA, but instead chose to spend his first two years of college at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. After that he went on to the Art Center, graduating in 1983 with a degree in commercial design. Portfolio in hand, he spent the next two decades building a successful freelance career as an illustrator in Los Angeles, where his work appeared in magazines and on CD covers, posters, and book covers, including Scarlett, the sequel to Gone With the Wind.

Though his professional endeavors focused on commercial art, Haynes continued to paint in his free time and eventually sold his pieces in a local gallery. Consequently, when computers began to overtake the design industry, reducing the demand for illustrators, he was able to turn back to his fine-art practice full time. He had continued to hone his techniques and was ready to embrace his original love once again.

Soon after he ended his commercial career, Haynes and his wife moved back to Missouri, returning to the hearty, rural environment where he had grown up. Today they reside in the town of
Washington, where Haynes recently opened his own studio and gallery. It’s the first public space he has operated, and after working alone as a freelancer, he enjoys interacting with his community. He receives many commissions both large and small from local and national clients. Many of these are personal in nature, chronicling a family’s ancestral lifespan, and Haynes enjoys the chance to bring their narratives to life.

The artist creates large-scale public art as well, and thinks of murals as “the holy grail” in terms of reaching the widest audience possible. “You can have such a powerful message when it’s at a huge scale,” he says. His murals can be found at the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and the Museum of Westward Expansion at the Gateway Arch, all in St. Louis; at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO; and in Kansas at Fidelity Bank of Wichita.

Haynes’ artwork is the subject of a 2013 coffee-table book titled New Regionalism: The Art of Bryan Haynes, published by Missouri Life magazine and distributed by the University of Missouri Press. He also illustrated the children’s book Growing Up With the River: Nine Generations on the Missouri, written by Dan and Connie Burkhardt and published in 2016 by Walsworth Publishing Co. The book inspired a documentary, “Rivertowns: 100 Miles, 200 Years, Countless Stories,” that premiered on public television stations in September.

Haynes focuses his current body of work on regional vignettes, reimagining in vivid detail the storied heritage of his own cultural ancestors as well as that of indigenous peoples. He first painted the landscape around the age of 10, working with a portable watercolor set and a pad of paper. However, he didn’t feel the excitement and gravity of such an undertaking until he was at the University of New Mexico, immersed in the art of the Taos founders and their surroundings. “It really marked the beginning of interpreting the landscape consciously, with an intention to create a specific feeling,” he says of that experience.

It took moving west and then returning to Missouri for him to be able to see the landscape the way he does now, in terms of shapes, color, and light alive with the history of place. “As an illustrator, I’m a storyteller,” says Haynes, and that paradigm shift kindled a desire to present visual narratives about the battles and achievements of his predecessors. “There’s just something about this area, the way Thomas Hart Benton drew the landscape—when I came back here from California, I saw exactly what he was describing in shape and form.”

Haynes paints his home state but also travels regularly to New Mexico, where he has completed a creative circle of sorts by returning to paint the Southwestern landscape that had enchanted him decades before. He prefers to paint in his studio, but collects source material on-site via his own photographs and plein-air sketches, along with research in books and museums.

Subject matter often finds him, revealing itself through tangible experiences with nature, or through books about farmers, frontiersmen, and local heroes. He finds that the stories he reads often come alive unexpectedly as he explores the outdoors. He cites as an example seeing a broken, craggy tree while floating down the river and connecting it to a scene in a book. “I can’t explain why,” he says of these encounters. “Two disparate things come together in a way that I’d not seen before. I guess that’s the way of seeing something that’s familiar and making it new.”

Haynes describes his art as a new take on the American Regionalism style of the 1930s, which depicted everyday life in Middle America. His first exposure to the movement came while leafing through his father’s art books, as he soaked up the rich visual narratives of Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, N.C. Wyeth, and others. “They were storytellers, too,” he says of the first artists
to illuminate life in the Midwest.

Though Haynes honors their legacy, he moves beyond a simple retelling of their work with narratives that have yet to be told, at the same time pushing the aesthetic into a more contemporary realm. “I’d like to think my work has one foot in the legacy of the Regionalist storytellers and one foot in current and modern design,” he remarks. “It’s fun to give a slightly different view of some of those people than I’ve seen before. I don’t want to just repeat what other people have said about historical figures. I’d like to have a new vision of the people who came before us.”

Haynes paints in acrylics, rendering his figures with great precision and sparing no detail in constructing his multifaceted narratives. His work is naturalistic, with a tonal quality that amplifies and energizes both the visual elements and the emotion imbued within each storyline. Strong directional lines create a sense of movement. Carefully arranged compositions convey an overall robust quality, echoed in the vivid hues and the sculptural shapes that make up each scene. Haynes considers a compelling compositional design the most important visual cue in any of his paintings. For him, a well-constructed composition stimulates viewers visually while also moving them emotionally. This is one instance where his time as a commercial illustrator continues to impact his fine art methodology.

The largest element within his canvases, the landscape, functions as more than a generic backdrop; it is a character in the larger story. It is both a framework for and a critical part of the narrative, and thus it sits on equal footing with the figures and animals also featured. Haynes displays a tight command of all three and adeptly arranges conversations among these principal components. “Combining a casserole of all of them is the magic,” he says. “I’m trying to integrate figures with the landscape, and they become one with each other. That’s really what I’m after.”

“My pursuit is beauty in all its forms,” Haynes adds. He constantly searches for that perfect fusion of strong design elements, beautifully crafted compositions, thoughtfully rendered figures, and a captivating narrative that will most effectively deliver what he desires above all: a story powerfully told.

representation
Manitou Galleries, Santa Fe, NM; Maxwell Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Kodner Gallery Fine Art, St. Louis, MO.

This story was featured in the December 2018 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art December 2018 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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