We are very sad to announce the passing of Alan Hayward, a long standing member and former chairman of Arena.
A quiet, gentle man, who let his ability to depict natural shape, pattern and rhythm speak through photography. Prior to becoming a commercial photographer, Alan was a physics teacher, but art was always his real calling. Looking at his images it’s amazing to see how he created such a sense of order out of nature’s apparent chaos. His skills allowed him to offer us all ‘big’ pictures of small intimate landscapes. He adeptly portrayed these on widely differing mediums, and in various forms of presentation from block mounts to canvas. His pictures utilised soft lyrical colour, abstraction and natural form in a way that can only be discovered by an intense utterly personal visualisation.
As a commercial photographer, he supplied the pictures for the book ‘A portrait of Winchester’, which shows another side of his vision. Originally working in Salisbury, Alan and his wife Mary retired northwards to Alston in the high Pennines and in later years to Hexham in Northumberland. There they involved themselves in Art circles and community projects, photographing the seasons and gentle landscapes. Despite failing health, Alan still made the long and arduous journey south to come to Arena meetings a few times every year and in one of his last public appearances to a large audience gave a brave and utterly honest presentation of his landscape pictures at an Arena Seminar.
Alan chaired Arena for a while and he joins the band of the Arena ‘hall of fame’, all those profoundly talented photographers that are still in a way members but no longer with us. We’ll miss him as we do those who have gone before, his work and his name will crop up frequently, as theirs still do. Thank you Alan for sharing your pictures, your company, and your way with words in that soft knowledgeable voice.
