Eddie Howard
2019
50 x 50 cm

oil on panel

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Eddie Howard (he/him) graduated in June with a BA in Fine Art from City and Guilds of London Art School, and is co-founder of The Tub. Eddie uses predominately Gouache on board, creating chalky, permeable surfaces into which his watery paint absorbs like paper. He works in series, using archetypal subjects to explore the tradition of European painting. He considers his paintings as an act of drawing; often from life, sometimes photographs, as in his recent series of FaceTime portraits. The real subject of his work, however, is the act of observation and recording. The finished work becomes a souvenir of the time spent obsessively pursuing colours, an honest record of the artist’s exchange with the subject:

“I think about making a 1 for 1 translation of the physical world; each blob of paint is a recording of an area of colour I’ve observed. It could be anywhere from 30-500 recordings that make up the entire image. It’s like being a big camera with a very slow exposure, except unlike a camera you also record your behaviours during the making of the painting. I see areas where I have meticulously and obsessively recorded the correct colours, and areas of broader, more hasty brushstrokes.”