The first thing you notice standing in front of a Chris Hayman painting is that it is doing more than one thing at a time. From across the room, it is a landscape: a horizon line, a field, a stretch of water, a stand of trees. Walk closer and it dissolves. The horizon turns out to be a long thick smear of white oil paint. The field is a scraped-back passage of green sitting next to a pulled streak of pink. The painting breaks down into pure gesture, then rebuilds itself into a place again as you step back.
That motion, the distance and closeness, the abstraction and landscape, the paint and feeling, is what Hayman has spent the last thirty years learning how to do. Her new exhibition, Beyond Nature II, opens at Piper J Gallery in Truckee on Thursday, November 5.
What critics have said
Writing about her recent exhibition at Studio Shop Gallery in Burlingame, critic Bart Charlow compared
Hayman's work to the late paintings of Monet, "where the brushstrokes are more alive than the flowers." Her canvases, he observed, "feel as though they are reaching out of the canvas toward you."
The writer Kelly Jean Egan put it another way:
"Hayman is not offering us a landscape so much as the feeling of one."
That distinction matters. Hayman does not set out to represent a place. She sets out to make the painting hold the way standing in a place feels. She captures the light, the movement, the weight of the air, the color your eye catches before your brain names it.
A Classical Pianist who paints in the wet
Hayman was born in New York City in 1964, and before she painted she played the piano. She trained
seriously as a classical pianist at the Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati and Baltimore, where she was also active in theater and dance. That training still sits beneath everything she does. Her compositions have phrasing. Her canvases have rhythm. There are rests in them.
She came to painting through study: a B.A. in Art History from the University of Maryland, then an Art Education degree from the University of Nevada, Reno, where she first began investigating painting seriously. In 2000 she received a Sierra Arts Foundation Grant. For years, her work was pure abstraction.
Then she moved to a farm in Northern California. That was thirty years ago.
"Before, my paintings were pure abstracts. But living on the farm for 30 years, nature just filtered in."
The land did it on instinct. She was not setting out to paint landscapes. The vocabulary just arrived in the shape of a field, the weight of water, the color of sky before a storm, the particular green of foliage after rain. She calls the current body of work "lyrical abstract, nature-based."
Her method is as physical as the subject. She works wet-into-wet, laying thick oil paint onto the canvas and moving it before it sets. Heavy passages sit beside areas that are pulled, scraped, or brushed quickly into place. You can follow the direction her hand moved. Nothing is hidden. There is no overthinking.
"I'm process-oriented, not conceptual. I paint in the wet."
Where her paintings live
Hayman has shown in more than one hundred exhibitions across the United States over the course of her career. Her work is in galleries from Connecticut to Utah to North Carolina to California — she is represented by Cavalier Galleries in Greenwich, Julie Nester Gallery in Park City, and Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte, among others.
Her paintings are held in the collection of Adobe Systems, among other corporate collections, and in the private collections of Howard Stern and Paul English, co-founder of Kayak. House Beautiful ran one of her paintings on its cover in 2012. Rue Magazine featured her work in 2023. She was recently reviewed in both the San Mateo Daily Journal and Artists of Utah's 15 Bytes.
At the collector level, her large-scale oils have become something of a signature for the modern mountain home. The scale suits a double-height wall. The color holds up alongside a lot of wood and stone. The gesture reads from across the room, which is often how these paintings are seen, standing at the kitchen island, looking across to the great room.
At Piper J
Chris came to Piper J Gallery for the first Beyond Nature exhibition. Beyond Nature II is her return. The gallery represents contemporary artists working at a collector level, with a particular focus on original work for the modern mountain home. Chris's paintings sit squarely in that conversation.
Chris’s paintings reward a long look. They work the way the land she lives on works: abstract from a distance, specific up close. It’s the kind of contemporary oil that lives in Adobe’s collection and in private collections from Silicon Valley to New York, and this November, it’s hanging in Truckee.
- Piper Johnson, Founder, Piper J Gallery
See Beyond Nature II
Beyond Nature II is on view at Piper J Gallery in Truckee from Thursday, November 5 through Wednesday, December 2, 2026. An artist reception is scheduled for Saturday, November 7, from 4 to 7 p.m., with an artist talk by Chris at 5 p.m., as part of the First Saturday Truckee Art Walk. The reception is free and open to the public.
If you can't make it to Truckee in November and want to see how a Hayman reads on your own wall, Piper J offers in-home placement through its Gallery on Tour program. Reply to this post, or reach out through the gallery, and we can bring work to you.