Matthew Kangas

The art of Paul Havas (1940–2012) is one of natural beauty, formal control, and unusual colors. Havas settled in the Puget Sound region in 1965 and went on to create a body of work dominated by oil paintings and drawings of landscapes and cityscapes, attracting admiring critical attention and considerable acquisitions by important museums. This book draws on Havas's archive of writings, letters, and documentary photographs, as well as accounts and interviews with critics, curators, fellow artists, and friends to set the artist in a perspective of Pacific Northwest and American art history. The result is a lively tale of flyfishing, rural cabins, sophisticated city life, and doggedly consistent work habits in studios in Seattle and the Skagit Valley. Quiet yet friendly, like his appealing paintings, Paul Havas is revealed as thoughtful and witty, with serious ideas about art, culture, and his own position in contemporary art. Readers are sure to enjoy this lavishly illustrated volume with extensive color plates, useful contextual images, and historical documentary photographs.

The art of William Ingham demonstrates how the modernist tradition, specifically Abstract Expressionism, has flourished in the Pacific Northwest. This lavishly illustrated volume brings to a wider audience the Seattle-born artist's highly gestural and vividly colored abstract paintings. Exploring gesture, form, scale, color, touch, and texture, Ingham's paintings are exuberant statements.Tracing the artist's evolution through detailed analyses of individual works, distinguished art critic Matthew Kangas builds the case for Ingham's significance and, in so doing, broadens the literature on Pacific Northwest art to include nonregional influences on artists of the area, drawing Northwest art closer to other modernist traditions and innovations in American art.