Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard
Born	1969 (age 47–48) Easington, County Durham, England
Nationality	British
Known for	Painting

Rachel Howard (born 1969) is a British artist.

Rachel Howard grew up on a farm in Easington, County Durham. She attended a Quaker school from the age of sixteen, and the stories, concerns and questions raised by religion have had a profound effect on her work throughout her career.

Howard graduated from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1991

She was awarded the Princes Trust Award in 1992 to support her art practice and received the British Council Award in 2008 and in 2004 was shortlisted for the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

In 2008 Howard designed the front cover for The Big Issue.

Howard is currently represented by BlainSouthern in the UK.

While Howard more recently employs oil paint, from 1995 - 2008 she primarily used household paint

"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 [Howard’s] pictures, [is] 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."

Howard’s ‘’Sin Paintings’’ comprise seven monumental canvases, each painted in a range of intensely saturated reds, offset by the use of bright yellow and orange. The paintings were exhibited in a solo exhibition entitled ‘‘Guilty’’, at the Bohen Foundation, New York in 2003. The paintings have a glossy, mirror-shine surface, through which a simple cruciform shape emerges. They do differ from one another; ‘‘Pride’’ is an offering of brilliant red down-strokes, with a cross discernible in its centre; the reds of ‘’Envy’’ are more individuated, with yellows breaking through here and there, and the cross far less readable; the hues of ‘’Anger’’ are in a darker, more brooding range.

Although the religious element seems obvious within these works, and the series certainly engages with issues relating to religion or morality, Howard herself has confessed that the title ‘Guilty’ in part refers to the guilty pleasure of painting.

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Wikipedia