Raymond Howell has developed a new method of painting in low relief using gauze fabrics, plastics and paint. The subject matter is sombre, tragic or sometimes sinister: death heads, a wraith in golden helmet with a wooden sword collaged into the picture, a whole charnel house of grotesque nudes; even one of the apparently more innocent pictures, Two Sisters, little girls in ballet costumes, has a mask quality with dark holes for eyes. His Cock Fight is not between roosters as we know them, but huge primeval fowl; Shopping News has a newspaper collage background for manikins with masklike heads but garbed in a heavy impasto of orange paint. There is one abstraction in this group which has obviously grown out of an effort to use the material for its implicit qualities––the stretchiness of stocking silk, etc., and the relief pieces tend more in abstract directions and veiled symbolisms than Howell’s other paintings, but his clear dedication is to realistic subject matter. This exhibition also contains a quantity of paintings in at least three other distinct styles, all frankly imitative of well known social-conscious realists of the 30’s and early 40’s. Though these are painted with considerable fluency, the show would have been more satisfactory without them.
—Knute Stiles
