CENTRE FOR MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
STUDIO CERAMICS AND ORIGINAL ARTWORK

Howard Coles is an increasingly acclaimed contemporary artist, producing contemporary landscape paintings and working in the UK. He has exhibited throughout the UK and worldwide, with his work held by national collections in Singapore and Malaysia. He was recently elected to the Royal Cambrian Academy.

Painting
His painting agenda is one in which the interaction of water and land, of weather and light dominates his images and pushes his techniques. Seemingly all embracing, the coastal landscape sustains his vision. It creates an impetus which enables the phenomena of light on sea and shore to be observed. It calls for new ways to impart to paper and canvas a variety of treatments which re-create the play of light on water. The activity of the coastline is the principal theme in Howard's art. Structures and spaces where sea meets land and the elemental forces which has formed this boundary has resulted in some of his best work.

Howard's paintings reflect the nuances of shape and form, of drama and visual interest which is bound up in his coastal landscapes. At times his work is frank, edgy and dark. Other work indicates a softness that is transcribed from the more gentile elements of this environment. Literal elements in much of his work are subservient to his feeling for the abstract, the synthesis of the visual and the sensual, - the expectations of any given landscape and the private confrontations with the more meaningful focus on what is being expressed in his work. This ranges from large heavily pigmented oil paintings of cliff faces and rock formations which tell tale upheavals in the creation of the landscape, to subtle, colour washed observations of light and atmosphere. From his visits into this powerful landscape he aims to extract out of the whole gamut of visual experiences something which will provide an essence -not so much as an idea to be developed, but experiences which are given form by their exposure to things observed and sensed.