Hi, I’m Grace.
Abstract art is my state of mind. It is a visual experience and conversation that can be compromised with words. I prefer to let viewers open their minds, hearts and emotions to what they see and feel in my paintings.
Abstract art is my state of mind. It is a visual experience and conversation that can be compromised with words. I prefer to let viewers open their minds, hearts and emotions to what they see and feel in my paintings.
Mark Ormond, Curator/Art Historian: “Grace Howl is centered, inventive and meditative. Her work is ambitious. She says her art is not about perfection. She does not care about mistakes. Howl revels in her process and is confident in the possibilities. Her work reflects this optimism. Howl is the rare artist who trusts her intuition completely. She allows and even encourages the viewer to enter into a conversation with her paintings and return to them again and again always learning something new from the exchange. Her work appears timeless, fluid, suspended.”
2019 www.markormond.com
Kevin Costello, Art History Teacher, Lecturer, Artist: “The spontaneous rapid gestural strokes of Grace Howl’s paintings use architectural rigor and geometric/biomorphic tropes such as the implied cross of a city’s intersection seen from above. This is particularly the case in her recent “Urban Series. At times she appropriates the magical world, the symbolic language of pre-industrial cultures like the petroglyphs of Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals. The palettes of these works make use of the full spectrum of color – some are earth tones with white, others an organic fusing of primary, secondary and tertiary colors with no tint or tone.
Having established these broad outlines in her compositions, the sympathetic observer adopts a seemingly narrative eye while scanning an essentially abstract painting. On a subliminal level, the viewer at first sight might see what appears to be a smudge or accidental blotch, but on further scrutiny the psychic energy of the work is found in the interplay of the abstract gesture and the subtle narrative detail imbedded in the paintings scrumbled passages. In one of her paintings, what appears at first glance to be a black expressionist series of marks becomes on close inspection to be a detail of the erotic Hindu bas-reliefs on the Khajuraho Temple in India. Howl’s paintings display inexhaustible emotional energy contained by the dimensions of the canvas. She locks in this energy by contrasting volatile line and dramatic figure/ground relationships -- thus disguising these narrative tropes (visual metaphors) as random expressive markings. She says, “I am in the moment” when painting -- “In the zone” when these ancient archetypes arise and conjoin with expressionism. They are bold eclectic confabulations that for the time you stand before them take us back to the personal, universal world, of magical thinking.”
