UVic show details Victoria artist’s complex genius
What: The Averted Eye Sees: the Life and Work of Glenn Howarth, curated by Jenelle M. Pasiechnik When: July 30 to Oct. 23 Where: Legacy Maltwood Gallery, Mearns Centre — McPherson Library, UVic, 250-721-6562, legacy.uvic.ca
Glenn Howarth was a wonderful artist. His prodigious skills as a draughtsman and colourist were matched by his keen insights regarding the physiology of vision. His superior intelligence made him seem a bit scary, and there was a darkness and depth to his thoughts. But with friends and students he shared a kindness and curiosity that were ever-present.
Howarth was born in 1946 and lived in Victoria almost all his life. After graduating from the University of Victoria in 1970, he achieved sudden and national fame with his paintings, which brought the eerie slipperiness of Francis Bacon to local scenes such as gas pumps and puddles at Rock Bay. But in the 1980s his fame seemed to slip away, as government support for the arts disappeared in this province.
He continued to paint, but not since his 1977 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria have we been offered a chance to come to terms with the extent of his contributions. Other than the patronage of Michael Williams and his Swans Hotel, there was little encouragement.
In later years, Howarth found true love, and moved to Brentwood Bay. There he revelled in the light of his studio on the water, drew students to his side, and painted pictures full of sunshine. And then, in 2009, he slipped away.
Artists are usually more appreciated after their deaths. The complexity of Howarth’s imagery and his writing were baffling to me at the time, but now, in his absence, I find his work profound and wonderful. To our great good fortune, his creations have been preserved for our further consideration. Ars longa, as they say. Vita brevis.
Thanks to the estate of Williams and others, the University of Victoria’s Legacy Art Collection has 48 of Howarth’s works — including 20 of his tondo paintings, and additional works in oil, acrylic, charcoal and graphite.
And through the generosity of Howarth’s daughter Rhiannon and her mother Liz Williams, the University Libraries Special Collections has received nine boxes of Howarth’s papers — correspondence, personal writings, exhibition ephemera, letters, sketches, newspaper clippings and a priceless treasure: his photo archives.
Already, this trove of material has attracted the attention of students and scholars. John Durno of the UVic library staff recently made heroic efforts to rescue Howarth’s computer-generated graphics, written for the Telidon system between 1981 and 1985. These digital paintings, a first in western Canada, are part of the current show.
Graduate student and curator Jenelle Pasiechnik has had a first look into the papers and assembled an excellent small survey of arts and letters to accompany the paintings.
The show includes 11 oil paintings spanning Howarth’s career, from a Bacon-esque self-portrait to a shimmering field of nudes at Wreck Beach. Among the “tondo” circular canvases are his famous “back of the bus” scene, and a prescient view of a little girl minding a table of firearms at a gun show.
Pasiechnik, in her excellent text panels, explains that a circular canvas alters the perspective and focal points of the traditional picture with corners, often raising the horizon line. A circular work of art appears to extend beyond its bounds, as if only a portion of the whole has been captured. Looking through his gun’s sights, when a shooter focuses on a single object, everything in the periphery dissolves into a blur. Those circular gunsights frame the world in the same manner as a tondo painting.
As he painted, Howarth found that spectres and phantoms arose and spawned meaning and, though he was surprised by the materialization of these subliminal thoughts, he allowed them to inhabit his painted reality: One canvas shows a nude woman, sunbathing, entangled in threads like something from Gulliver’s Travels.
When his art sales dwindled to a trickle, Glenn Howarth created the Victoria Drawing Academy in 1987, at his studio at 16 12⁄ Fan Tan Alley. Picture a model under a round skylight, encircled by sketching students, and the floor littered with the crumbs of soft erasers. He always
focused on the technical aspects of draftsmanship, skills that talented students such as Noah Becker continue to apply. Some of Howarth’s pedagogical aphorisms are included among sketchbooks that fill 26 display cases in the current show. Howarth was, for a period in the 1970s, art writer for the Victoria Daily Times, but his thoughts were beyond most of the public. Now, at last, I am ready to hear what he was saying: “In the forest, I see uncountable leaves, a plurality of branches and tree canopies with constellations of sparkling holes. Instantly I am flooded with a sense of place. There is a mood … A sharp pencil is no beginning. A precision edge would be premature. The forest place I recognized whole in an instant cannot be additively built from a complexity of secondary particulars … The origins of form must be carried back into the inexact, the vague and the ambiguous: the products of previous experience, analysis and reflection cannot be reassembled into a fresh unity. Vagueness is rich with possibility and in the drawing process passes automatically, by innate intent, to something precise and definite …” Shortly after his sudden death in 2009, Howarth’s partner Deborah Russell told Times Colonist writer Grania Litwin: “He had just been out for a walk with our dog, Sam, and perhaps he was a little tired. He sat down outside, and his heart stopped. His last view would have been a beautiful canopy of trees.” Glenn Howarth is gone, but not forgotten.
“The head looks, the averted eye sees, the focused eye recognizes. From one horizon to the other, painting is this everyday act played backward.” — Glenn Howarth