Familiarity is inclusive. We identify with what we recognize. The format of a landscape is recognizable immediately – a crisp horizon line, a graduated sky, illusions of perspective, light and gravity all create a familiar introduction to a painting. This is the hook that Stephen Howard dangles in front of his viewers to capture their attention.
How he holds this attention is an entirely different matter, for beyond the initial taste of landscape, this self titled ‘reluctant realist’ tells a much more multifaceted story. Like the extraordinary length of time it takes Howard to create a painting, each work needs to be visually absorbed over time. It is only then that the enigmatic qualities of his works emerge.
Howard is known for his landscapes, yet he seldom depicts a single place. He takes buildings out of their original context and re-imagines them in a way which questions reality, rather than reflecting it, lending a delicately surreal air to his work. These isolated buildings are often placed directly in the centre of his compositions, haunting his landscape. For Howard, “there is something interesting about a building by itself, a form of melancholy and solitude that is best expressed in a simple composition”.
If Howard’s works are contradictory and enigmatic, they are also memorable and articulate. The artist is concerned with representing a memory of a place, rather than an actual place and in this way he evokes moods and feelings that seem familiar even if the scene we are looking upon may not be. His handling of light is particularly distinctive in its clarity, showing the result of the many hours that Howard spends on each composition.
So what can we make of these apparent contradictions? How can a work which exudes a visual unfamiliarity, have a recognizable emotive aspect to it? Is this due to the autobiographical elements, the stories that Howard embeds beneath the surface of his works? Or is it because Howard so completely lets go of his paintings once finished.
Conceptually, the actual process of painting is much more important than the finished work and perhaps this is why the viewer feels such an affinity with his creations – Howard hands the concept over to us. We can make what we want of his surreal yet familiar landscapes. In this sense, he shares a visual affinity with the enigmatic style of Edward Hopper or Jeffrey Smart, although his formative influence remains firmly entrenched in the hard-edged realism of artists such as Rita Angus, Don Binney and Robin White.
Stephen Howard encases the New Zealand landscape in a delicately dreamlike atmosphere. After stripping the landscape of all but its basic shapes, Howard’s art captures the spirit of a place, leaving a lasting emotional impression upon the viewer.