Today we’d like to introduce you to Marianne Howard.
Marianne, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My journey has been like a labyrinth; seemingly heading in one direction, doubling back, then off again, traveling in circles but still on my life path. Maybe a labyrinth spiral is a better anology?
I grew up in the mid-west the eldest daughter of my father, a Luthern minister and my mother, a church leader, and an artist. They made a loving home for my sister and me and I was encouraged to develop my keen interest in art, first learned in my mother’s studio. I’ve made art continually since childhood.
I completed my freshman through junior years of my BFA at Wittenberg University a small private Lutheran school and transferred my senior year to The School of The Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Yet, I only recently returned to painting full time in January of 2019, after a successful career in the global institutional investment business. What? See? Labyrinth. 😉
My family moved to Texas in 1980 and I worked here briefly before being transferred to Houston then Philidelphia, returning to Dallas in 1995. I took some time mid-career to travel and photograph and volunteer. I climbed Kilimanjaro, hiked the Inca Trail, did a solo trip to Borneo and Sulawesi, had a bit of an Eat, Pray Love experience, built houses with Habit for Humanity, served on the board of The Texas Women’s Foundation and generally reevaluated my life. After that, I decided to give investments another go and traveled extensively until I retired a few years ago.
I’ve been painting and showing locally this year with Ft Worth Community Art Center, VAST , Texas Visual Arts Association – (I newly serve as President of The Board. Look for exciting things to come from this great Dallas institution.) and in September exhibited in Saatchi’s first Dallas offering of, The Other Art Fair.
In my investment career I was the Director of Institutional Investment Sales and Services for Vanguard, the mutual funds’ company, and then Senior Vice President at two regional TX brokerage firms. I am often asked how my two careers in art and investments are related. Well, the short, simple answer is they are linked by my curiosity and need to explore and learn about things that interest me. The longer answer is better told over lunch, someplace lovely with a view and a nice glass of wine. For now, I’ll drop some breadcrumbs and offer, there are clues in my current work and my new series, “We’re All Gorilla Girls Now”.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
Over time, and through the heavy international travel for business and pleasure, I carried my camera to satisfy my creative need. Happily, one photo trip to Myanmar in 2001 with National Geographic photographer, Nevada Wier, led to a solo show of my photography at The Crow Museum of Asian Art in Dallas.
However, I prefer first-generation processes – the tactile feel of my hand making work is…well, hard to describe, but is the essence of why I make art.
Art making is my innate, visceral response to a primitive, direct, need to “make” and feel my hand and body involved in the process of releasing and understanding my energy (mental, spiritual and physical) in a tangible way. It is literally my “handwriting or better said my hand-righting.
We’d love to hear more about your art.
I’m interested in combining my love of drawing, painting, art history and photography with my life experiences.
I’m exploring photographic images of women in various time periods and how they were captured, presented, preserved and ultimately discarded as the basis of my new series- We’re All Gorilla Girls Now.
This theme emerged earlier this summer after starting Mary Gabriel’s book, “Ninth Street Women. Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and The Movement That Changed Modern Art.”
Reading about the lives of these five women artists, who were working during my childhood and youth, commingled with the MeToo stories of our time, merged with an imprint of an article I read about the Guerrilla Girls and ignited my new Gorilla Girls project. By the way, I use Gorilla Girls, in the nod to them and the masks they wear but choose not to use their word “Guerrilla” because I think it carries a more militant mantel than I am working with.
The photo sources in the series are one of many vintage photographs I collect from antique shops and flea markets. My interest stems from photographs my grandfather staged and shot of my mother in the mid-1920s.
He would dress her in costumes and pose her in toy cars and wagons of the day. I first used his originals as inspiration for a series of etchings I did at SAIC in the late 70s. My professor, by the way, scared me to death when I showed her the work because, unknown to me, she had a reputation for working with dolls. She freaked out and thought I was mocking her by submitting my dolls to her. She could not be convinced that these were my family photos and I knew nothing of her dolls. Aww… the craziness of art school…but the memory of working with these images lingered and attached itself and continued in my lifelong interest in photography and its relationship to our understanding of ourselves.
So photographs and tables and women and kitchens and frosting and atomic pink, enamel surfaces, coffee and sassy poses and women wearing pants or slacks being unconventional for their time ….are all my subjects, yet they are unknowns, strangers to me, pulled from the bins at antique stores but she/they are also iconic images to me of time and change and process.
In my piece “Gorilla Girls Drink Coffee” I imagine this is not her house and her kitchen but she is the rouge family member or friend visiting at holiday being her full self and photographed by perhaps her sister or sister-in-law who caught a glimpse of herself in the freedom of the subject’s humor, ease and boldness, drinking and enjoying her coffee and breakfast while implanting herself, kicking back in the surrounding kitchen; which ironically is where I paint to be near water and the sink to clean my brushes and my coffee maker while I work.
What were you like growing up?
Like my work, I am process-oriented, as in “The term process art refers to where the process of its making art is not hidden but remains a prominent aspect of the completed work so that a part or even the whole of its subject is the making of the work.”
I’ve often said my life is like a beautiful hand-loomed rug; a series of short, knotted, seemingly incomprehensible threads until you turn it over and slowly a pattern and of color and design emerges.
I know and admire Brene Brown’s work on vulnerability and couldn’t agree more.
Creativity/making art is about being vulnerable, risk-taking at every turn. One of the risks in my style is the messiness of it and the risk that it will be misunderstood as a lack of technical drawings skills or a disregard for the craft but that is kinda the point. I am not a patient woman. Never have been. I know it’s considered a virtue. I’m still wondering why. Patience and persistent are two different things. I am persistent, especially in my optimistic view of the world and my place in it.
The act of making art is visceral to me and I enjoy leaving evidence of my experience not only in the work but letting it become the work- like ancient footprints left in the mud and fossilized. They are there to be discovered by the viewer as evidence of my path and there to be explored by anyone whose journey intersects mine.
I’d love to hear how my work affects you. And if you are an artist, invite you to come to join TVAA and let’s work together and talk about your work!
Contact Info:
- Website: mariannehoward.com
- Email: marianne@mariannehoward.com
- Instagram: marianne_howard_artist
Image Credit:
Anindita Dasgupta
Personal Photo
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