Rachel Howard

British artist Rachel Howard plays with the tensions between control and chaos, order and entropy, making and unmaking, beauty and destruction. She revels in the sheer joy of her material. The intense physicality of her process grapples with notions of uncertainty, fragility, beauty and horror. Over the past 25 years, religion, repetition, mortality, madness and violence have been recurring themes in the work. A student of both Fine Art and Art History, for Howard the use of the endless portal of the internet as a fresh source of constant inspiration and a dialogue with the world around is as essential as the art of the past.

In Howard’s hands paint can be atomised, poured, smeared, scuffed, layered, sprayed, deleted and erased, to achieve the desired 'feeling'. These unapologetically emotional paintings can be either very large in scale or tiny vignettes of tragedy. Howard often displays an irreverence for her material, for example in the 1990s and early 2000s she used only household gloss paint, wanting to humanise this functional medium used mainly for painting doors and windows, using gravity as an invisible paintbrush to achieve the desired effect. It relieved her of the piety of traditional oil paint and was a nod to her heroes, the Abstract Expressionists of the not too distant past.

The last decade has seen Howard return to oil paint albeit with a design to manipulate the material in an obtuse manner. Here the paint is sprayed and atomised over nets used as gigantic paint brushes producing large alizarin crimson abstract paintings. Smaller works are built up and sanded back, grids are constructed with oil paint and a T-square that are then are unpicked and destroyed with turps, gravity and varnish creating a palimpsest, suspending the action in time. In another ongoing series, Howard repeatedly paints a view of a walkway through a wood close to her home, creating works that shift in style, mood and tone as she navigates the scene over the seasons, a mediation on time and space.