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May 29, 2012
Cecile Brou Mongrue
May 31, 2012
Vibrant colors surge in amorphous shapes, dripping down the watery surface of Re’ Howse’s abstract paintings. These eclectic works are only a fraction of the 47-year-old California native’s body of work, which includes media ranging from ceramics and photography to collage and textiles.
Born Mareva Manon Orr to a Tahitian mother and an American rocket scientist/jazz drummer father, Re’ (pronounced ‘Ray’) Howse grew up influenced by her creative family.
“I have been surrounded by artists all my life,” she says. “My grandmother on my father’s side was a milliner and an actress. My aunt was a prolific artist, as were my cousins, who were sculptors. I have a lot of relatives who are actors right now. My dad was a jazz drummer; he would be cranking out jazz tunes at night.”
Howse’s interest in the arts was fed through high school and her early jobs, working as a florist, antique dealer, Italian chocolatier and even acting and doing voiceovers. It was not until 1992 that Howse began pursuing art as a career in itself.
“I always did art on the side,” she says. “I had left my PR job and was helping my ex-husband run his machine shop. And he asked me, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ I said ‘I’ve always wanted to be an artist.’ And he said, ‘Why don’t you be one?’ That was pretty much it; that was the jumping-off point.” With that Howse enrolled in Los Angeles Harbor College, where she took every available art course.
In 2005, she and her husband moved from California to Louisiana. “He and I met in California,” says Howse. “He was working on a tugboat out there whose captains were both Cajuns from down the bayou. I remember when we still lived in California, I came out for a friend’s wedding in Cut Off. I was sitting outside, and I’m like ‘I can see me living here one day.’ And here I am.”
After their wedding, Howse and her husband moved to Gretna to find work, only to be relocated to Louisville, Ky., by Hurricane Katrina. In January 2006, Howse returned to south Louisiana and moved to the town of Mathews, where she currently produces work out of her studio.
Howse’s artwork most often takes the form of paintings, ranging from spray-painted portraits to abstract fields of color. Her focus on paintings was born out of a simple reason.
“The lack of facility and/or equipment,” she explains. “In my studio in California I had the full kiln, so I worked with a lot of ceramics. I had the darkroom accessible to me at the college. When I came here, I had to pick something that I could get into, and painting was the easiest one. I literally got brown wrapping paper from the store, and I found a box of oil pastels and drew pictures on them and hung them all over the house.”
Her style of painting has evolved over the years. For a while, she experimented with creating portraits of friends or pop-culture icons by making cut-out stencils of their faces and spray painting them onto small canvases.
“I pretty much have these things down,” she says. “A lot of the first ones were just plain with the stencil on the front and not a whole lot of extra patterns or designs. So now I’m extending on my background stencils, different paints, different textures I can add to the pieces.”
Another style Howse has explored is creating abstract paintings based off of music, ranging from classical to contemporary.
“I create to a lot of diverse music,” she explains. “If I’m doing a series, I’ll listen to the same songs over and over again, so that the pieces come out cohesive. My thing really is abstraction, so the circles are very prevalent in my work, as is the watery-drippiness. I don’t know if that’s because of my beach-y, surfer, Polynesian influence or what, but it tends to be kind of watery and/or crazy.”
Howse found a public venue to showcase her work in the form of Art Versus, a monthly exhibition held at The Boxer and The Barrel in downtown Houma, where local artists can hang their work for free. “I got this message from Rusty Bouvier,” she says. “He bought some small paintings from me three years prior. He said, ‘You need to come out to Art Versus, your stuff would be really fun’. I remember they were all talking about it, so I said ‘OK, I’m gonna come in.’ I saw a few pieces sell and they were so excited about it, and there was quite a large crowd.”
After selling several of her own pieces within the first two weeks, Howse became a regular at the Art Versus exhibitions. “Because I could actually say I sold stuff,” she says, “I started encouraging other artists to participate, or at least come out and visit.” She was also hired to paint a mural in The Duke, a restaurant situated next door.
Howse holds the simple philosophy that all people are born artists: “I believe at some point you start to venture off in another area. That’s where adults say, ‘Well, I can only draw a stick figure.’ That’s because at that point you’ve kind of stopped with your art. But in variations we go on, and we appreciate art, we support the arts in some way, whether it’s entertained by it, or patron to the arts, or what have you.”
Re’ Howse, a Mathews-based abstract multi-media artist, displays a painting. Howse’s work goes on display June 29 at The Boxer and The Barrel’s Art Versus exhibition.
