SUSIE

“Suzie” is a subtle, beautiful & delicate work, wood block printed onto Japanese “Shiohara paper.  Each print put through a press and then hand finished with a traditional Japanese Baren tool.  Rachel says that, ‘since seeing the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2009 of the Japanese artist Kuniyoshi, she has beem affected by the delicacy of his line and medium as a whole, especially the way he represents rain and pattern, violence and beauty and have since ventured into this territory making many woodblock prints of which Suzie is one, the contact of the sharp tool on the block is so satisfying but also unforgiving not unlike painting’

Howard was born in County Durham in 1969 and graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 1991. She grew up on a farm in Easington, County Durham. She attended a Quaker school from the age of sixteen, and the stories, concerns and questions raised by religion have had a profound effect on her work throughout her career.  With an oeuvre that suggests the delicacy of flesh, the subjectivity of perception and the complexity of our emotional spectrum, Rachel Howard could be described as a painter of life.