Art About Art Being Destroyed

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.

He had this to say about the besmirching of the equestrian statue by the protestors:

“Monuments advance certain explanations of the past and blot out others. Monuments to warriors on horseback have been raised nearly everywhere celebrating institutional violence directly inwardly or outwardly.”

Warriors on horseback, like the Baquedano, are raised to imposing heights in urban centers that people in the contemporary moment are increasingly turning against with ferocity.

“When the warrior is celebrated for violence directed inwardly, individuals from targeted communities often reside in the warrior’s shadow, hovering above them as a constant reminder of their powerlessness and marginalization as the warrior stares forward from the saddle of his obedient horse, often at enormous heights such as Manuel Jesús Baquedano González in Santiago, Chile.” “Making images of the intentionally erased is a formal challenge.” He added.

In an interview with NRM we asked Howard a series of questions pertaining to history, and the politics involved in statutes on the arts.

NRM: By defacing public monuments, does this act determine an erasure of history? Do people get to rewrite history? Howard Skrill: “The graffiti added to the Baquedano is a historical narrative that collides with the extant narrative of the monument’s creators. This interchange is not only fascinating but forms new historical narratives. The Anna Pierrepont

Series explores this process. The argument that history is inviolable because it is ‘historical’ is absurd. Lived reality in its vastness and dynamism is selectively pruned to correspond to particular narrative arcs. People of the past are not uniquely entitled to shape our current moment as we are not so entitled to do so for people yet to come.”

NRM: How do public monuments symbolize a piece of our history? Howard Skrill: “Sites of memory are places where identity is forced upon those who pass through these mostly urban places. Monuments are extraordinary examples of hubris as witnessed in Anna’s sarcophagus. Anna insisted on being remembered, the passage of time increasingly revealing her folly. Monuments are almost always physically durable.”

NRM: Do the crafting of these statues represent arts in politics? Howard Skrill: “Monuments transcend politics because of the durability of their material nature, freezing into place social orders that appear inevitable. We are witnessing not epochal but rather revolutionary change.”

“I spoke recently to a Jewish refugee from the Old Soviet Union. The man lived through removals of Lenin statues and professed no love for Lenin. He also understood that removals reflect profound political instability preceding new epochs of an uncertain nature. His fears were entirely justified and he emigrated to the US.” NRM: Do you think that your choice in politics should always reflect on your art? Howard Skrill: “When Florentine artists created portrait likenesses of the Medici, the works were simultaneously political and formal. American abstraction emerged from dystopic modern experiences and was fueled by the desire for fundamental, societal, and economic transformation. As these works gained notoriety, the formal was emphasized and the political erased, opening space for a revolutionary praxis, co-opted and neutralized, to become ubiquitous. I have been asked repeatedly whether I believe statues should be removed or remain in place. Monuments are political, the erasure that they apply is eventually applied to them as well.”

Howard expresses the same flamboyance and realism from one of his other pieces on The Anna Pierrepont Series, such as Lenin in Yellow and Blue—a statue of the former Premier of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin, his coat adorned with Ukrainian yellow and blue.

Great artists don’t just pop out of the blue; they are made. To make such an artist requires years of hard work and drive and so,

we asked Howard: where did you find your inspiration from? Howard Skrill: “I have long been an adherent of the German artist Gerhard Richter who appropriated extant historical representations, exploring the intersection of nostalgia and trauma.”

He has been exploring plein-air drawings for over a decade now; his works were originally exclusive to plein-air with erasures discussed in textual companions. But, due to current events, he now creates his projects almost exclusively inside his studio with text migrating into images directly.

Howard’s favorite medium for expressing his kinds of art are marks and liquids on paper including pencils, gouache, pour paint, ink and gesso.

In a short video that Howard sent to NRM, he demonstrates his artistic techniques—he starts with light colors such as yellow and orange for the outline, then followed by darker and lighter colors to be intertwined with the original marks.

As he defines the contours of his sketches, his hand brushes over the outlines, smudging and covering blank areas with a burst of pigments; finally an image emerges amidst the chaos that ensued on the formally white paper.

As good an artist as Howard is, he still faced many challenges while working on his craft; we asked: what was the most challenging theme he has worked on and what was the easiest? Howard Skrill: “I had a remarkable experience when I worked on the campus of Bronx Community College where I taught for a decade as an adjunct teacher instructing non-majors in the art survey. The campus is the home of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans featuring bronze portrait bust likenesses of ‘Great Americans’.

One of these great Americans was Robert E. Lee. In 2013, I drew the bust in plein-air and was quite happy with the image, particularly the shadows that I captured falling upon his face in a spring early afternoon. Choosing the bust was easy because it was steps from the doors of my building. Lee was elevated to the curious status as a ‘Great American’ of a country he both repudiated and invaded. Such thoughts did not occur to me in 2013. I returned to draw the bust’s absence days after Charlottesville, fully aware of the absurdity of the circumstances of its inclusion and removal. Realizing the depth of my ignorance was difficult.”

His works are always thought provoking and mesmerizing; consistently exploring how art functions to influence collective perceptions. A realist and documentarian, memorializing a remarkable moment before it is consumed by something new. You can check out more of his works at Howardskrill.blogspot.com.

“What I’m attempting in each picture is nothing other than this...to bring together in a living and viable way, the most different and the most contradictory elements in the greatest possible freedom.”

-Gerhard Richter-