Raymond Howell
1927 - 2002
An African-American painter and printmaker, Raymond Howell had a difficult childhood environment, growing up in foster homes and with his formal schooling ending by the fifth grade. His interest in art started early … when he was eight he was made to do life-size sketches of his second grade classmates on the blackboard as a punishment for sketching during class. He became seriously interested in painting at the age of eighteen, working during the days to support his family and painting whenever he could.
In 1958 Howell left San Francisco to live in New York City. Over the next few years he traveled throughout the United States, lived in Boston and traveled throughout Europe and Africa, studying, painting, and experimenting with style and technique, before returning to San Francisco in the early 1960’s.
Although Raymond had no formal art training, by the age of thirty he was supporting himself through the sale of his paintings and had started to exhibit his work. Numerous one-man shows were held in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston and Provincetown. A solo exhibit titled, “San Francisco Night Life”, took him one year and involved paintings of 24 locations.
During the mid 1960’s, Raymond Howell opened Art Associates West, located at at 85 Carl Street in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. It was a combination art gallery – art school where he was both exhibitor and teacher. (He painted a mural on the wall next to the gallery where riders on the N-Judah Streetcar could view it as they traveled to and from downtown San Francisco).
Ray’s 1965 painting “The Brown Family” was shown at the Inaugural Exhibition of the Oakland Museum of California, and was later purchased for the museum collection. His paintings were exhibited widely throughout the United States in solo and group shows during the 1970’s and 1980’s and his large masterwork serigraphs and lithographs were included in International Art Expositions in both New York and San Francisco. Retrospective exhibitions took place at Stanford University in 1999 and at the Oakland Museum in 2002.
Raymond Howell began painting when there was little public interest in African American art. During his lifetime, he served as an inspiration and role model for young artists was committed to promoting arts education opportunities for Black and Hispanic children. He co-founded an art school for poor and minority children in the San Francisco Bay Area under the auspices of Project Dare in the 1980’s.
Raymond Howell’s paintings are based in realism, with influences of surrealism, impressionism, and modern abstraction. During the 1990’s he created series of paintings depicting ballet dancers and jazz musicians who were innovators, and he experimented with abstraction and painting combined with collage.
Raymond Howell was an extremely versatile artist and his paintings show many of the techniques used by both the Old Masters (extensive layering of thin pigments for luminosity) and the modernists. His works express his personal experiences and his deep understanding of life.
Raymond Howell died in Oakland, California on January 6, 2002. On that same day an important exhibition of his recent works opened at the Oakland Museum. He was to speak at the event however his death his death had to be announced to a shocked attendance who were looking forward to meeting the artist and listening to him speak about his work.
Many of Howell’s paintings depicted scenes of San Francisco and Oakland, California. In September of 2002 the San Francisco Board of Supervisors declared that September 7th (Raymond’s birthday) would be ‘Raymond Howell Day’ in San Francisco, and in Oakland, January 6th was declared to be ‘Raymond Howell Day’.
Source:
https://raymondhowell.com/about/
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