Catherine Howe 'Wallflower'

About

The many-hued paintings introduced here represent an exuberant and visceral catharsis, punctuating the end of a period of extreme isolation for the artist. After the shared solitude of the Covid outbreak, she was further sidelined by a diagnosis of blood cancer. 

Excluded from socializing while undergoing treatment, she spent three years experimenting freely in the studio and garden that surrounds it with her silent companions: the local flora and fauna. 

The results are a dazzling array of flower figures, which are non-existent in nature and spring wholly from the painter herself. They move nimbly across the canvas in lush, variegated brushstrokes and whirl on iridescent and mysteriously luminous fields. 

Nothing stands still. Color and sheen shift dramatically as the light moves within the paintings’ embrace. 

Howe’s forms project the cloud-like innocence that we associate with a child’s imagination; they are freehand and free-willed, the creations of a brush liberated to do whatever it wants, to turn any smooth surface into a riotous little Eden.- Alexi Worth

Catherine Howe has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe for over thirty years, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, MoMA PS 1 in New York, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.  She lives and works in the Hudson Valley, NY.

For additional information or visual material please contact the gallery by email at gallery@vonlintel.com.