DVAA Member since 2018

Brenda Howell

Website:

brendadhowell.com

About:

Brenda Howell is an Encaustic, Mixed Media artist working in 2 and 3 dimensions.
She lives and maintains a studio in the Philadelphia area.
Her interest in encaustic began when she took coursework at Temple's Tyler School of Art. She continues her education with classes at Studio Incamminatti, Fleisher Art Memorial and Cheltenham Center for the Arts.
Her mixed Media work has a raw, visceral quality that reflects her interest in African spiritual and artistic practices.

Artist Statement:

“For as long as I can remember, I have been drawn to color and texture – wanting to produce beauty, but not beauty in the conventional sense. I desire to bring out the heavenliness that dwells in the imperfect, the unrefined and the discarded; a loveliness that quickens the soul and breath and makes you not want to look away but deeper. Encaustic, from the Greek enkaustikos, means to heat or to burn. Beeswax, pigment and heat are its source elements and together I find them endlessly fascinating and artistically fulfilling.
Beeswax is melted, color is added/blended, and applied with brushes sometimes thickly, sometimes thinly, each layer going from liquid to solid in a matter of seconds. Each layer is then fused with a heat gun. Layers are scraped (archaeological / excavation / mystery – going deeper and deeper) and applied, sometimes as many as a dozen times. It’s a laborious process with images arriving by intention – and by accident. I always have a kernel of an idea of where a painting will “go” but the fickle nature of this medium often leads to a serendipitous destination. In my work the intent is to suggest the ‘presence of an absence”, to intrigue the viewer and set up a dialectical tension that is deliciously painful. Thru texture, color, layering and found materials (wax, rust, wood, anything discarded yet lovely) a tension is achieved – beauty vs. ugliness, aggressive vs. peaceful, forgotten vs. precious”