These paintings bring together themes of mortality, isolation, longing, melancholy and loss and sit somewhere in between the physical constraints of reality and the anarchic realm of the subconscious.
The works draw from gothic motifs, fairy tales, literature and archaic tropes to explore broader issues relating to the physical and subjective self within contemporary society.
Howe has developed a form of image making that is both hyper-realistic yet deeply concerned by the poetics of form and symbolism.
The resulting paintings are meditations on the variability and fallibility of memory.
His ambiguous and lonely works are derived from preliminary sculptural explorations; the figures not based on real people, but intended to appear as statues, solid yet strangely weightless within a quiet space.
