A brush with fate

Clifford How started out working as a tradie but drawing and art were always part of his life and it was just a matter of time and destiny before he was covered in oil paint and producing brilliant landscapes for a living

Landscape artist Clifford How has a way of describing his work that sounds more harsh than any critic would ever dare. He talks about the paint being just “splattered” or “slapped on”, and uses words like gouging and scraping to describe his technique, and takes great pride in his occasional use of a plasterer’s trowel in place of a palette knife. From a distance his landscapes are striking — moody, textured and with a keen eye for colour balance and contrast. But the closer you get, the more they deteriorate into a chaos of thick-smeared oils and big brutal sweeps, and the image becomes almost too obscure to make out.

That is precisely the experience How is trying to create. “Years ago, when starting out, I showed my work at the Deloraine Craft Fair a few times,” How says. “And I remember a lady walking up to one of my paintings, going closer and closer to it, and then turning to me and saying ‘that’s an absolute mess!’

“And I thought, ah, this is good, I’m on to something here! The fact that she could see the painting was nothing but a great churning mess of paint up close, satisfied me to a point where I could say that was a direction I wanted to go.

“I like my work to have that almost photographic impression from a distance, as you walk into a gallery, but as you get closer and closer, it breaks down into that abstraction, and I don’t hide anything, you can see everything I’ve done to the paint.”

Perhaps How’s former life as a tradie has a lot to do with his distinctly unromantic approach to his craft. How, 46 from Launceston, spent more than half his working life as a floor-sander, much of that time in Melbourne after moving there in 1999.

Since childhood he has enjoyed drawing, something he started to take more seriously as a hobby. He has never had lessons and is self-taught. “The whole time I’ve been working I’ve been drawing,” he says. “Just mucking around in between my day job. But it wasn’t until I came back to Tassie in 2010 that I started taking drawing and painting seriously.

“When I got back to Launceston I was working on my own as a floor sander for a while and the benefit of working for myself was that I had more free time and I used it to sketch.

“Then one day my wife bought me an ‘en plein air’ box as a present and I started going out on location to do landscapes. It was hard, but I ramped up my work really quickly to a level I was happy with and that had that emotive quality but was still representational.”

How continued his self-education, buying and reading every book he could find about landscape painting and practising over and over. He experimented with pastels to explore the use of colour and mixing. He travelled to Europe to visit galleries and see the works of the masters, saying the experience gave him a

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