After a long, high-level career in business, I had an auto accident in December 2007, resulting in brain injury that changed my life. I awoke a different person, verbalization was difficult. I didn’t recognize my own face in the mirror, but I saw colors and images and visualized the world in a new way. In 2008, I intuitively turned to art to transform myself. I am self-taught.

 

I began using paint as my new language. Abstraction has replaced the concrete, color has replaced words. Art has allowed me to convey my emotions, my interpretation of life, my interactions with people and my storytelling.

 

I want viewers that look at my art to appreciate the interconnectedness of life and creativity by creating an immersive and intriguing experience, stirring their imaginations and evoking an emotional response.       

 

Process: I trust my intuition and let it guide my creative process. ‘I am in the moment, in a zone and in the flow when creating.’ It allows me to experience truth, beauty and innocence; capture a mood, emotion or thought with movement, form, texture and color. I paint large contemporary abstract expressionistic paintings without fear and without rules.

 

Artist Statement: “Art is a visual experience. It can be compromised with words. I prefer to let viewers reach into themselves and discover what they feel and see rather than interrupt their internal conversations with my words.”

 

Influencers in my work: Helen Frankenthaler (color fields); Picasso (variety & freedom); Antoni Tapies and Alberto Burri (expressing dark emotions of pain); Lee Krasner (painting large and expressive) (side bar - an image of my work was compared to Krasner’s work by a new curator in her thesis presentation 4/2019 at USF); Georgia O’Keeffe (change your perspective); Mattise (simplicity); Syd Solomon (use of layers, colors and mystery). 

 

Art historian and critic, Kevin Costello wrote about my work: “The spontaneous rapid gestural strokes of Howl’s art displays inexhaustible emotional energy contained by the dimensions of the canvas.  She locks in this energy by contrasting volatile line and dramatic figure/ground relationships – thus disguising these narrative visual metaphors as random expressive markings. Howl’s works are bold eclectic confabulations that for the time you stand before them take us back to the personal, universal world, of magical thinking.”

 

In 2017, I opened a working studio and gallery space at 419 Central Avenue Sarasota, FL 34236.

 

My work is in private residential and commercial settings in various locations in Florida, Boston, Canada, New York, Washington DC, California, Chicago and the UK. 

 

Grace Howl