Alan Howell won First Prize in the VAS George Hicks Foundation Contemporary Exhibition 2025

with his painting Greyscale 7

Alan Howell working in his studio

I have been studying colour and tone for over 60 years and will be continuing these studies in 2025.

My mother diligently traced her family back to 1570. In that comprehensive survey, from northern Germany, the Cornish Coast and England, there were a few ‘colourful’ characters but no indication of any artists. I’m sure it was the same on my father’s side; engineers and boiler makers from Wales. So where did my artistic aptitude come from?

I was born just after the end of WW2 on the bombed eastern fringes of London. There were many more children than homes and schools to accommodate them. Education was not a high priority for me and I failed the eleven-plus exam and found myself at a half-built secondary modern school for boys. It was rough and tough but I liked the vigour of the post-war art that was emerging and often took myself off to the Tate Gallery and the Whitechapel Art Gallery rather than go to school. (You could get away with this in those days!) At this stage I liked flat colours and outside school made a book of images that I’m still pleased with today!

1963 Still Life

Gouache on cardboard

To a certain degree I also attribute my interest in art to my girlfriend, Linda who came from an unconventional family, unlike my family of career civil servants. She was studying art at the local girls’ school, and I gate-crashed her classes. Her inspirational teacher recognised something in me and was sympathetic and encouraging, allowing me to inveigle my way into her classes. I never stopped to think about how awkward it might have been: one 15-year-old boy in a class of twenty-five girls, but I was too mesmerised with this new world to be self-conscious.

I also attended the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s Saturday sessions in the third-floor gallery where young artists taught classes and workshops for school-age art students. Meeting ‘real’ artists meant that I could ask them how they worked and ask practical questions, which the art teachers at school could only answer theoretically. There was also the Gallery downstairs.

When I left school, and was thinking about a job, I rejected my parents’ conservative values and, with the encouragement of Linda’s art teacher, successfully enrolled in the four-year Diploma in Art and Design course at Hornsey College Art. I majored in textile design and learned a great deal about colour, textile chemistry and screen printing. I considered it a perfect blend of science and art. My parents were bewildered. My interests were overwhelmingly in pop-art, particularly the work of Roy Leichtenstein, Peter Blake and the early work of David Hockney. Colour, patterns and structure have always captivated me.

1970 Original Curnard

Oil on canvas

Graduating in 1969 I was in the right place at the right time; London, in the swinging sixties when the emerging and high-energy fashion scene needed people who could innovate, blend colours and create a new concept of design. Barbara Hulanicki from Biba recognised I was the person who could collaborate with her and her carefully curated team of people who would disrupt the stuffy, class-ridden view of fashion and women. I was the person who could create a lipstick colour that matched the now iconic suede boots. And I could do this by the next morning. I was on a fabulous rollercoaster, working with the most exciting and talented minds of the time, challenging the existing concepts of fashion, fabric and colour. Changing the world.

Of course, like most of the great epochs, it crashed dramatically, and I reflected on what I loved about the work I had created and how I would apply that to my next challenge.

By chance, I went to the graduate exhibition of hand bookbinding from the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts. I was drawn to the practice and enrolled in the certificate course. It was something about a solid, practical object with a specific purpose that could be decorated, enhanced and made beautiful with leather, gold or silver and paper. I was taught and encouraged by the brilliant bookbinders such as Bernard Middleton and James Brockman and they encouraged me to take further studies in the conservation of books and paper. Again, I was blending my artistic skills and passion with my rational and scientific mind. Finally, at the Camberwell School of Art and Crafts I was also able to spend a further year studying Print and Drawing Conservation.

1977 Design Binding - The Glass House

Hand-bound in grey goat skin with black calf onlays and white & red linear inlays; silver leaf titling

On completing my studies in 1979, I joined a British Library sponsored project at the Geological Society of London as their Head Conservator. I was preserving the earliest paper-based geological maps in the world. These beautiful, hand-coloured and finely executed works of art mesmerised me.

Eight years later another opportunity came up to head a new Conservation Department at the State Library of New South Wales. This lured me to Australia and, like London in the swinging sixties, it was a time of change in libraries and conservation, and I was there, at this exciting transition. After more than a decade, I was recruited to lead the conservation, preservation and storage services at the State Library of Victoria. These roles gave me access to many of the great treasures of Australian art as well as diverse and interesting artists, curators and academics and encouraged me to re-think of my own art practices and what I wanted to explore and study.

2019 Lattice 1

Acrylic on canvas board

For the past decade I have been re-exploring the ideas of colour graduation and structure and how they create energy and patterns that imprint on the brain and affect the senses. Mark Rothko, Josef Albers and Kazimir Malevich are some of the seminal influences that inspire me. And every couple of years I need to go to San Sepolcro and the small towns in Central Italy to look again at the Piero della Francesco masterpieces for their timeless coolness. I also find the modernist movements in architecture and mid-century design stimulate me further.

2020 Greyscale 1

Acrylic on canvas

2021 Greyscale 5

Acrylic on canvas

My art practice is also influenced by my interest in cinema, particularly the French and Italian new wave, black and white, stylistic movies of Roberto Rossellini and Jean-Pierre Melville. Their structure appeals to my sense of aesthetic. And I work listening to the music of Steve Reich, John Adams and Philip Glass that follow this same minimalist pattern.

I am currently working on projects that explore colour, its range and power with the aim of exhibiting these works at the VAS next year. 

2023 Random 07a

Digital Design 2023