Hayes, Randy

American, b. 1944

BiographyRandy Hayes painted from photographs for many years before he began painting directly on them. He learned early on that certain gestures in the photographic image are unique to the medium and not necessarily part of other visual experience. He concentrated on these and learned to combine them suddenly in his viewer’s field. When he now paints on a grid of photographic prints tacked to the wall of his studio (and later tacked to the wall of an apartment or museum) he is careful not to completely obliterate the underlying imagery. The larger painted image is often derived from one of the photographs. This tends to create an analog for memory: in real time he saw a very large array of things, but the memory of the experience is defined by a single image superimposed on the field of choices.

Randy Hayes was born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1944, and completed a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Arts (now Memphis College of Arts) in 1968. He began painting directly on photographs in 1990, and turned his artistic intentions to the American South at approximately the same time. He has been recognized with a WESTAF/NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship; Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Visual Arts Award; and a Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Boise Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and Tacoma Art Museum, among others. Additional institutions that have collected his work include the United States Department of State, Washington, DC; Microsoft, Redmond, Washington; Port of Seattle; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; and Laguna Beach Museum of Art, California.