catherine howe

november 22 - december 21, 2025

These paintings resist being seen as images and are instead physical manifestations that exist outside of imitation or mere representation of nature. They take a personal language of botanical painting to the edges of pure abstraction, creating a lyrical world where minuscule flowers speak about universal notions.

Plant forms are embodied in reflective materials such as iridescent mineral pigments, metal leaf and brushstrokes made of tiny glass beads; mediums that project the solid, objective world of nature into the ineffable, ethereal, realm of the spirit, where abstraction is not apart from representation, merely a heightening of its expressive power.

Stripped of naturalistic color, they have an agency and transformative potential. There is continual movement in an alchemical process whereby flora and their attendant fauna are transformed, light as air, into pure sunshine or fluid quicksilver. These ecstatic entities mirror the human body in motion.

Evocative of poetic garden events such as the first winter frost, when petals become sugary and crystalline, or an early morning dew making the spider web into a string of pearls. This work is born of nature’s capacities to speak to our human qualities and connects to a long thread of animism in the arts. It is a condition of being alive to the world, with a heightened sensitivity, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux.

Painting can exist as a bridge between the world within and world without, animating earthly materials into being.