The Brooklyn Rail

The painter James Howell developed his very particular style over a series of formal and geographic changes that together shaped his unique vision. Though born in Kansas City, Missouri, Howell spent formative years on the West Coast, including in the Bay Area, where he earned a degree in English literature in addition to one in architecture at Stanford University. From there he travelled to Washington state to work in the seclusion of San Juan Island, a locale that prompted a lifelong interest in atmospheric phenomena between the land and sea. During frequent trips to visit his mother in New York he came in contact with Fairfield Porter, a family friend, who greatly encouraged his early forays into gestural figuration. This comprehensive survey at the Parrish Art Museum includes a selection of this work, which also evinces Howell’s sophisticated contemporary awareness of artists such as Richard Diebenkorn and how a study of figurative subjects could suggest further experiments in pure abstraction.

Ultimately, Howell arrived at a mature body of work characterized by carefully calibrated registers of closely valued proportions. These paintings evoke his enduring fascination with what he termed “dissolving oppositions,” an aesthetic principle closely aligned with Taoist philosophy. Howell spent nearly half of his working life immersed in the often fogbound coastline of the American Northwest, and he attributed the region’s cyclical dissolution of optical edges, caused by shifting weather conditions, as a central influence on his approach. While his work can at times recall the ethereal horizontal bands of muted color associated with Agnes Martin, Howell’s visual language ultimately emerged through a more empirically grounded and phenomenological process.

The first room of the exhibition features the artist’s early figurative works, including Girl in Landscape (ca. 1969) which, with its elegant field of a quasi-abstract and predominantly green landscape supporting an urbane woman leaning on a director’s chair, exemplifies Porter’s influence. Boxcar # 9 (Lemon) (1969), a work in which both Color Field painting and Pop art influences appear to have occupied the artist simultaneously, shows Howell’s rapid assimilation of more conceptual, abstract tendencies. By the mid- to late-1970s, however, Howell came fully into his own, producing a more rigorously abstract and exploratory body of work, including Port Blakely #22 and #23 (both 1977). In these paintings, Howell moves decisively toward non-objective compositions built from extremely undersaturated, dominant hues, punctuated by points of darker value—dimly perceived entities dispersed asymmetrically within a crepuscular haze. These works already reveal Howell’s inclination toward a loosely diagrammatic, lateral articulation of minimal optical difference. This sensibility would continue to evolve and ultimately define his mature and late style: carefully measured and meticulously mixed bands of color of subtly contrasting values, existing in simultaneous tension.

Moving through the exhibition, wisely orchestrated by the Parrish’s curatorial team of Corinne Erni, Kaitlin Halloran and Scout Hutchinson, what unfolds is Howell’s steady commitment to a strictly empirical approach to painting. An approach which, nevertheless, evolves with a poetic sensitivity to light and optical sensation that keeps one engaged in a constant questioning of their immediate perceptions. In the substantially annotated exhibition catalogue, art historian Jason Rosenfeld likens Howell’s involvement with optical phenomena to a painterly tradition (he posits Caspar David Friedrich’s contemplative landscapes as one such precursor) of aerial perspective in which vast distances are described in microtonal shifts. An intriguing correlation can be drawn between Howell’s conceptual trajectory and Paul Klee’s notion of the Graupunkt, or “grey point.” For Klee, the grey point dissolves binary black-and-white thinking about the ultimately unknowable origins of abstraction, situating perception within a quasi-mystical, almost quantum, dimension of perception. In this space, both optical distinction and traditional ethical differentiation are suspended or minimized, allowing meaning to emerge prior to fixed oppositions.

After working through potential formats for his compositions in the 1990s—often literally mapping out both their mathematics and optical manifestations in paintings, prints, and drawings—by 2000 Howell favored a serial format consisting wholly of horizontal bands of precisely calibrated values (he weighed his pigments on a scale) that present optically as fluid fields of light. An obvious art historical correlation can be made between Ad Reinhardt’s optically elusive black paintings and Howell’s ephemeral striations. Both artists had deeply investigated Eastern ideas of Taoism as an inspirational alternate ethical model to the New York art world’s often fickle aesthetic preoccupations, yet Howell certainly leaned into a more strictly empirical approach than Reinhardt. From such a comparison one could surmise Howell’s almost scientific approach to painting as having more in common with the systemic approach of an artist such as Sol Lewitt and hence a Post-Minimalist painter’s approach to procedural aesthetics.

Consider a work such as 94.75-96.66 Four-part progression 10/19/03 (2003) in which four separate canvases, each measuring 66 by 66 inches, are hung in precise intervals on one wall. Scanning across these, the viewer’s eye is compelled to search for any definite edge condition until a certain resolution of encounter occurs. This indeterminate point of “irresolute resolution” or “point no point” can be said to embody the meaning of Howell’s lifelong search for the “in-between” and the “dissolving oppositions” that has come to characterize his singular achievement. Segueing from Howell’s late work into a subsequent gallery at the Parrish, one encounters Hiroshi Sugimoto’s suite of photolithographs “Time Exposed” (1980–91). Howell is quoted in the catalogue as remarking that his work is “like a Hiroshi Sugimoto without a horizon line on a cloudy day,” a statement that makes clear his shared apprehension with Sugimoto of infinite space—though, in Howell’s case, significantly without any obvious representational limit. If one has ever actually experienced an American Northwest seacoast on an overcast day, one can clearly grasp Howell’s allusion. Because the grey aspect of the sky is reflected in the ocean, the definition (or edge condition) of the horizon is greatly diminished.

It’s a canny curatorial decision to position Sugimoto’s suite as a kind of summative coda to the Howell retrospective, since the artists’ differences ultimately contrast more than they complement one another’s aesthetic trajectories. The resulting juxtaposition makes evident that Howell’s formats have little to do with any notion of an event horizon, whereas Sugimoto’s images quite literally fix phenomenal moments in time. This distinction, between the abstractly constructed and the temporal and site-based encounter, helps to clarify the differing capacities of painting versus photography for addressing optical consciousness. The exhibition catalogue includes a brief autobiographical essay by Sugimoto in which he describes his desire to capture his vision of a “primeval sea,” one he describes as ultimately lost to historical memory. Considering Howell’s own sustained engagement with the shifting phenomena of the American Northwest coastline, a parallel foundation becomes apparent. Yet in Howell’s case, as opposed to Sugimoto’s, the primeval is not approached as a recovered image or a poetic remnant of timeless memory. Instead, it is reconstructed and sustained through an empirical, abstract procedure—one grounded in analysis rather than recollection. It’s the kind of distinction Howell’s analytical temperament would likely have relished.