Mountain

I treated Johns portrait as a landscape; a mountain looking back at us, questioning our presence.
I wanted John to emerge from the warm, burning haze of the background, and used
layers of glazing, washes and ‘lost edges’ to make sure he was integrated, and not set apart from the atmosphere.
I painted him to embody a strong, imposing presence – leading up from the lower reaches of the hands, by way of an undulating and constantly moving line.
I met John during a class I was teaching – somewhat ironically, in portraiture.

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Ben Howe is an Australian artist born in London. Over the course of nearly two decades, he has explored the nature of consciousness, personal history and the incongruities of memory through his artwork, which has taken him to England, Germany, China and the USA.
He holds a Masters of fine art with distinction from RMIT and is the recipient of numerous grants, international residencies and fellowships.
Action, isolation and refraction surface as thematic currents in the practice of an artist whose work functions as a platform for broader considerations relating to the physical and subjective self within contemporary society.
Ben has developed a signature quasi scientific aesthetic that is at once hyper-realistic yet reductive. His at times stark and lonely works are often derived from preliminary explorations in other media such as sculpture, photography and film; his process distorting the boundaries of the real and the perceived.