Rob Howe paints scenes, a neighbourhood corner or a street verge, and his paintings allow you to see a place more completely. He pays attention. The artist might do this through selective focus, a kind of exacting inattention that responds to volume and light, essence and time. Howe has developed his own pictorial conventions within which he operates naturally and fluidly. His recent work feels at ease, as it expands into a comfortable complexity. Now he can paint a road blue and it feels right.
All these new works are scenes within the vicinity of his home studio. He walks his children to school and revisits these spots. He moves between clarity and impression – a question of what to make clear and what to merely evoke. What does the work require? As he finds a wider reception to his paintings, the warmth and versatility grows in his practice. It feels like this in the studio, talking a little about music and a lot about art. Paintings are stored under the house, reworked and newly considered. And as each picture is brought out, we talk around the good struggles in a painting, how some demand definition between forms while others work with less clarity. I see these wonderful transitions of precision and integration. Working with light and volume as Howe does captures a reading of locality: the way the sun cuts back into the valley as it sets over the escarpment.
Rob Howe likens his landscape paintings to pop songs, based on a tradition where he can explore contemporary variations within the form – atmospheric and time-based. It can be an expression of love or the everyday. An image flies by but it takes hold, suggesting a mood without having to summarise. The analytical mind looks for focus, but the emotional core needs a visual softness. A painterly evocation takes in a scene with empathy. Writer Barry Schwabsky speaks of contemporary landscape painting as a means of “paying attention”. Rob Howe is doing this, and his observations are local but essential. It is why he is now finding a broader audience for his work. His paintings allow us to also take time and pay attention. -Melody Willis
*Schwabsky, B 2019 Landscape Painting Now: From Pop Abstraction to New Romanticism, Thames & Hudson.
