The Work
While Howard employs oil paint, since 1995 she has primarily used household paint, setting her apart from the likes of Rothko and Barnett Newman.
"The fluidity of the paint is so gorgeous I felt like I wanted to conquer it and control it."Howard allows the paint to separate inside its can so that the pigment and varnish can be used in isolation. The pigment is applied to the edge of the canvas, then diluted and manipulated through the addition of the varnish. Gravity’s pull then draws the paint down the canvas.
“The first thing that strikes you about pictures, this seamless downpour of paint: a vertical torrent that seems to advance from one painting to another, sometimes fading out before it reaches the bottom of the canvas, only to fall unbidden from the upper edge of another." “Howard’s paintings are built architecturally. The terms she uses are those of the builder: construction, reconstruction, building, layering and assembling. Gravity is her brush. Layers of paint accrue built by dripped pathways of paint."Read more about this topic: Rachel Howard
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Do not put off your work until tomorrow and the day after. For the sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor the one who puts off his work; industry aids work, but the man who puts off work always wrestles with disaster.”
—Hesiod (c. 8th century B.C.)
“Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of being created so as to understand them to some degree.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)