Rachel Howard_Northern Echo

Bridge (Beach Banks) 2013 

Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

Insomnia 2013 

Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

Spit and Whisper 2013 

Oil and Acrylic on Canvas

Interior

Her  most-recent series of large and smaller scale paintings explore the idiosyncratic qualities of oil paint, unpicking the accepted rules of engagement with this most traditional of mediums. Howard explores the reverie associated with oil, and in a process of applying and then removing paint creates a palimpsest. The viewer thus experiences the final moment in the painting process, but one that also feels in flux.  The trace of the artist’s hand in the paintings is subtly perceivable, and Howard describes how the surfaces, ‘have a disintegration about them; everything is falling apart, atomised’. With only hints of colour characterising the palette of the canvases – gentle iterations of yellow, red and green – the line becomes the primary active element in each composition; emerging and submerging, appearing and fading, rising and falling.

A resounding potency of colour characterises each of Rachel Howard’s works, and yet it is not precisely colour that interests her, but instead the emotional charge of how paint is applied to a canvas—the state of mind and body which might be inscribed into a work through one’s expressionist application of the paint. Scale, space and depth are also notably important to the impact of these works, conveying either a sense of the sublime and limitless, as if we were confronting something vast and expansive, or indeed a sense of enclosed isolation, expressing how small and lost we might feel wandering within a world so big.

                                                                               (Photographs and articles from www.blainsouthern.com)

Rachel Howard: Nothern Echo

7 Feb - 22 Mar 2014

Blain Southern Gallery