Tine Hayes

A man with short dark hair, light skin, and brown eyes smiling slightly, sitting outdoors in a forest with tall trees and green foliage in the background.

Tine Hayes was born and raised in the mountains of Western North Carolina. He studied Art and History at the University of Chicago and Grinnell College. He moved to Gallup in 1998 and began teaching high school the same year. Twenty Eight years later he teaches Art at Miyamura High School and pursues his own Artistic practice. Hayes primarily paints landscapes exploring themes of the interconnectedness of the natural world and the human experience.

A painting of red rock formations, with a tree in the foreground with yellow and brown leaves, and a clear sky in the background.
A landscape scene with a railway track in the foreground, yellow wildflowers and shrubs in the midground, red cliffs in the background, and a dramatic cloudy sky overhead.

"I believe that humanity and nature are not disparate forces or parallel stories, they are the same. We are nature and nature is us. There is no natural and human world, there is just the world. The world we live in is shaped by our collective thinking. Our world is what we make it and we are what it makes us. My paintings are an allegory of that relationship.  

We are hardwired to respond to nature. It elicits a primal reaction in us. We are drawn to its beauty, awed by its purity, and intimidated by its wildness. My paintings draw on that primal response, but they are not nature, they are a distillation, a recreation, a collection of brush strokes on canvas. How you feel when you look at them is what makes them art."  ‒Tine Hayes

A watercolor painting of a dense forest with tall trees, light filtering through the branches, and green undergrowth on the forest floor.
A painting shows a highway with cars, a road sign missing a cover, a grassy landscape, a rainbow in a sky with dark clouds on the right and a bright, partly cloudy sky with a sunset on the left.
Painting of a mountain landscape featuring a waterfall cascading down rocky cliffs, surrounded by pine trees and evergreen foliage under a clear blue sky.
A landscape painting of a desert scene with a blue sky, clouds, and distant mountains. In the foreground, there is a tree and an old abandoned train car on the dry, rocky ground.
A painting of a rocky landscape under a blue sky, showing large boulders and dry vegetation.
A painting of a yellow leaf with water droplets on it, lying on a bed of rocks and small twigs.