EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
Cecil Howell
Imagine we're looking at a rock, green with lichen, bulbous in form, large as a whale. It is there, but as we study it a cacophony of earthen memories surface: the rock I played on as a child, the outcroppings where we found fossils, the boulders by the lake. They collide and recombine, a metamorphic process out of which a new rock emerges, composed of granite, memory, emotion. This is the way with place; it is always a layering of the physical and cerebral. Always part bedrock and part air.
I make work that studies this layering, digging into it and pulling up samples to examine. I make work with curiosity; I make work to remind myself that I’m here, that we’re here.
I find subjects, sites, or questions that flicker between real and abstract. I map the ephemeral and transitory, embedding the momentary in the language of cartography. I tie data to paint, discovering resonances between the abstract language of science with the physical qualities of materials. I spend days drawing only to erase my marks, letting the smudges become the drawing. My materials similarly span and slip. Pastels are heavy with pigment yet I can easily blow them across the paper. Cast paper can form sculptures, but becomes translucent in the light and dissolves with water. Melted pigments and ink leave unpredictable markings, sometimes saturated and sometimes ghostly. There isn’t one way to make or one topic, just a desire to stretch between the material and the cerebral.
The series presented here is an archive of ephemeral moments. They are drawings of deeply ordinary objects and shadows captured in fleeting compositions. The pieces lend importance to the accumulation of subtle shifts that make our days, but also speak to the fragility and ephemerality of our world; with a gust of wind everything changes.
