Artist Profile
INTVW by Chino Castañares A plein-air artist, realist, and a documentarian living in the boroughs of New York City, Brooklyn, together with his loving wife. You can often find him stroking his colored pencils at Green-Wood cemetery; creating magnificent art pieces inspired by funerary and other significant monuments. As a documentarian of various defacements of important monuments, it has sparked his desire to pursue plein-air drawings. The splashing of vibrant colors and the way light dynamically falls onto monuments fueled Howard’s creative mind. “The splashing of monuments often adds brilliant color to my images.” Howard told NRM. His project,The Anna Pierrepont Series (named after Anna who is a grand dame of 19th century Brooklyn), that dates back to late August 2011— explores the fate of public monuments and their impact on the erasure of public and private memory. Most of his art are sourced from extant images and objects, although his images may appear absurd, “it is the reality unfolding in the current moment that is absurd.” He said. The Anna Pierrepont Series started out quite modestly, when his previous project petered out, Howard and his wife sat on the waters of Red Hook, Brooklyn, and as he drew the Statue of Liberty from a distance, one thing led to another. One of his recent works, Baquedano, which portrays Manuel Jesús Baquedano González a Chilean politician and soldier on horseback; based on an equestrian statue that was placed at Central Plaza in Santiago before it was removed in 2021. The statue was the center of much controversy amidst the Chilean’s protest that began in October of 2019, some of these protestors doused the metal general and his innocent horse with gallons of red paint and set him ablaze. An unfortunate event but from the ashes there is a certain beauty that Howard captures in the thick of it all.
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NEW READER MAGAZINE
