So many people have killed themselves in the forest of Aokigahara that the Japanese government has stopped giving out statistics. Signs imploring suicidal souls to reconsider their plans pepper the Sea of Trees, as it’s known, at the foot of Mount Fuji, where the dense vegetation mutes all cries. In Rachel Howard’s painting of the same name, lines of dark oil streak a surface set alight by the brash yellow of a deeply buried undercoat of fluorescent acrylic. Although the picture is abstract, the eye cannot help but recognize landscape-like forms in its ethereal marks: ghoulish trunks, heavy rain, and the silhouette of a great mountain lurking in the background. The scene is blurred as if seen from the window of a passing bullet train.
With the title Sea of Trees, Howard doesn’t just authorize such interpretative digressions, she encourages them. Yet for this piece, as for most of those presented in the artist’s solo exhibition opening at Blain|Southern this month, overly literal narrative readings can be misleading. Howard is a painter in the full, loaded sense of the word: one who tackles physical issues of materiality, scale, color, composition. Her pictures engage the guts before the brain. That is not to say that they are conceptually inconsequential—they aren’t—but they function primarily at a bodily level, in their making as well as in their reception. “I do want people to feel something,” she says when I visit her barn studio overlooking a stunning stretch of English countryside. The artist and her family relocated here from London a year ago. “Since I’ve moved here, I’ve become a complete hermit,” she proclaims with glee. It’s easy to see why. Outside the studio, hills neatly divided by trimmed rows of bushes roll until the horizon. A white pony grazes in the field behind, and the vegetable garden is bursting with Brussels sprouts. It seems like a perfect place to think, and work.
The Blain|Southern show is called “Northern Echo,” an allusion to the artist’s County Durham roots. These paintings didn’t come easily; they rarely do. “I feel like I’m reporting back,” explains a semiserious Howard of this new body of work, which she sees as “a lot less selfconscious” and “much more intimate.” Black is omnipresent but never in the claustrophobic monochrome of an Ad Reinhardt or Pierre Soulages. Here it is all threads and lines, hatching and uncoiling, on the canvases’ surfaces—a nervous scripture spelling out the core of Howard’s pictorial lexicon. Color was a key feature of the artist’s earlier works. Pieces such as Brilliant White Three, 1998, with its yellow, raspberry, blue, and white stripes, or the counterintuitively named Green of the same year, which boasts orange, red, blue, and one very modest virescent patch, dazzle with saturated hues. But the artist has always confessed to having a conflicted relationship with color, that easy trigger of predictable emotions. “These new works keep my color problem under control,” she says. “It’s almost going back to language and paring back everything that could be a distraction.”
Howard grew up on a farm in Easington in the north of England. She was introduced to painting by her uncle, “a proper painter, who painted portraits, horses, and greyhounds,” she says affectionately. “He made being an artist a very normal thing.” The young Howard enrolled at Goldsmiths, from which she graduated in 1991, two years after Damien Hirst, and she worked as his assistant while he shot to stellar fame (“The best spot paintings by Damien Hirst are those painted by Rachel Howard,” wrote Germaine Greer in the Guardian a few years ago). Like her contemporaries Gary Hume and Sarah Morris, Howard adopted household gloss as her medium of choice—perhaps as a way to ground her emotionally charged abstraction, redolent at times of Barnett Newman’s Color Field paintings. Critic Sue Hubbard has described this contrast between the material Howard used and the conceptual territory she investigated as “spirituality for a postmodern world.” For years, gloss was a fertile terrain for the artist, who had even devised a technique of separating pigments and varnish and applying them at different stages of making the painting.
Gloss paint is no longer Howard’s signature. “I’ve gone as far as I could with it,” she says. “It can be very flat.” The artist has now embraced painting’s ultimate medium: oil. “But,” she is quick to point out, “I’m being really disrespectful.” She laughs off the idea of following strict rules when mixing the paint, trying instead to make it yield unexpected results. Often working on four or five pieces simultaneously, Howard applies her colors, lets them rest, then disturbs them with solvents, varnishes, or more paint, a process she refers to as “unpicking” the painting. It’s a push and pull between control and relinquishing control to allow space for the serendipitous. As a result, her surfaces appear unstable, in flux. Spit and Whisper is a case in point. Here, hundreds of black particles flicker as if on a screen, interrupted by waves of looser paint lapping them up. The overwhelming feeling is one of transience—the pictorial occurrence unfolding on the canvas seems about to continue its course. It resists painting’s intrinsic motionlessness.
"Spit and Whisper," 2013 [Courtesy of the artist and Blain|Southern]
It should be noted that Howard isn’t an experimenter for experiment’s sake. And she is acutely aware of the weight of history resting on every painter’s shoulders (“When you paint, every brushstroke speaks of everybody else,” she says). In the studio, a Rubens book lies casually on the piano. Masaccio, Chaim Soutine, and Francis Bacon are among her art heroes, but as the artist told Hirst during an early interview, “If you want to be a painter, you’ve got to embrace and then forget all that shit.” The challenge is to create a painting that is both timeless and relevant. Materials are a crucial factor in this endeavor. Household gloss anchored Howard’s production in a form of modernity; the combination of oil and acrylic in pieces such as the searing fluorescent-yellow and black If This Sounds Like You plays a similar role. Although superficially very different, the flower paintings included in this exhibition obey the same logic: This series of pattern studies was executed by stenciling mass-produced lace. This detail of interior decoration takes center stage, recalling the mundane domesticity of the gloss. It also functions as a compositional exercise in repetition, sitting at the frontier between figuration and abstraction—two areas in which the artist is equally at ease.
Howard is one of the few contemporary painters confident enough to tread this path. She modestly credits Gerhard Richter: “He made it very easy for people like me to navigate between the abstract and the figurative.” Looking at her production, which spans two decades, one cannot but admire the sheer ambition of her project. Selfdoubt and anxiety might have been the price to pay—one of Howard’s recurrent motifs is the black dog, a reference to Samuel Johnson and Winston Churchill’s darkest moods. The artist talks of “the feeling of selfloathing” she has applied to this latest series, of the sleepless nights when she sees paint falling off the canvases. But this creative angst only spurs her on to tackle the formal challenges of abstraction and figuration. On a conceptual level, Howard has painted subjects as heavy as suicide and madness. Perhaps as a result of her Quaker school education, the artist (now a staunch atheist) has also taken on such religious themes as the Ten Commandments and the Stations of the Cross—her rendition of the latter once described by art historian Joachim Pissarro as “sublime,” no less. Yet the artist is at her most ambitious when dealing with the physical material of paint. With this new series, Howard doesn’t simply expand her own practice, she gives oil paint a breathtaking contemporaneity.
Click on the slideshow to see images of work by Rachel Howard.
