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James Howell at Charlotte Jackson
Art in America, March, 2005 by Lilly Wei
Monochrome artist James Howell's distinctive body of work is based on an ongoing study of gray, his signature color. He executes his paintings in series--those presented here are collectively known as "Progressions," with individual titles consisting of numbers--and, at first glance, they seem to be uninterrupted fields of different shades of gray. In actuality, however, each painting consists of uniformly sized, tonally graduated horizontal bands that traverse the width of the support and, at times, continue around the sides. For the nine paintings in this exhibition, Howell mixed titanium white, ivory black and raw umber--the raw umber prevents bluing--in carefully calculated ratios to achieve what he calls "a movement of gray toward light and dark." Varying in size from 6 to 66 inches square, all the works were acrylic on canvas except for two immaculate suites on aluminum panel.
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The bands in these paintings are narrower than those in earlier works, so that the color transitions are even less apparent than usual, and, in some instances, the sides are painted, making the canvas more objectlike. Painting the sides, the artist explained, also prevents you from seeing an optical curve as you stand at one end of a procession of paintings and look at them obliquely. His palette of very subtle grays was lighter this time, more in the middle range (although in previous series it has veered from almost black to almost white). Howell's content depends on slight variations of his exacting formulas, including omissions in the expected tonal sequence, like a musical progression from which a note is missing. In fact, Howell's methods recall Carl Czerny's "exercises," known to anyone who has studied piano, many of which are brilliant compositions in their own right.
The upper areas of these canvases seem lighter than the lower regions, as if they were illuminated from above by a bank of gallery lights, but in fact the paintings actually do ascend in scale from dark to light. And yet it is the mystery of color, not its metrics, that makes Howell's project memorable. In the end, the grays vanish and return as light, a softly shimmering radiance that exists in the gap between the scientific and the sublime.
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