Lincoln
Howard
1. Welcome Lincoln to The Influx Gallery family. Tell us a little bit about yourself and where you are from?
I was born in Vancouver, BC Canada and now live in Surrey B.C. which is a suburb just outside Vancouver.
2. Were your family supportive of you deciding to become an artist?
My wife Sylvia was the one who suggested we take an acrylic painting class in 2018. We had a cool teacher Jackie, she encouraged me. I got the painting bug and haven’t stopped painting since.
3. Was there anything specific that you can remember that made you want to become an artist?
I always liked art. I went to galleries and had collected some art, but I never considered becoming an artist. I didn’t think it was something available to me.
4. Did your schooling or work affect your creative development in any way?
I always liked art class in school it was something I enjoyed. I’ve worked for 32 years at the Vancouver School Board doing maintenance work. Building playgrounds and fences and pest control. So, my work was the opposite of creative and artistic.
5. Where do you get your inspiration and influences from?
Images and shapes I see during the day. Architecture, politics, images from magazines and I borrow from artists I see on YouTube. I’m especially influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Sometimes paintings just come to me in my mind they just appear.
6. Do you have a favourite painting technique?
I like to use a large pallet knife or putty knife to move the paint around the canvas blending the colours as I move it around. Then I put my grid pattern down on the surface. The grid to me represents our lives the twists turns and decisions we make that shape our lives.
7. We are very honoured to represent an abstract artist displaying a vivid colour palette, does your creative process involve conscious or unconscious imaginings, or a mixture of both?
Both. I start out with a composition in mind a general design. During the making of the painting the colours are usually created using intuition.
8. What was your most enjoyable artwork to create/construct?
Hard to say, the latest paintings are usually my favourite at the time. I have one smaller painting I made a year or two after I started painting, I like that one because I have never been able to replicate the colours in that one. I’m keeping that one.
9. How long does an average piece take for you to paint?
Three days approximately.
10. We love your paintings that hint at the movement of abstract expressionism, yet maintain an original style. Where and how do you see your work evolving in the future?
I have some interesting ideas. I want to incorporate paint and photographs together on the canvas. I’m going through a thing with mirrors right now incorporating then into the composition of the paintings. Kind of like a mirror to the soul thing or a self-refection thing. I want to go a little political and I want to continue to incorporate found objects into the work.
11. Your work is poetic, and invokes metaphysical and spiritual depth. How did you come to focus on the subject of grids? And what does this system mean within your work?
My work is personal and spiritual to me. The grids just sort of came to me I can’t really explain it but I just started doing it and now incorporate the grid into almost all of my paintings. To me the grid is the human experience the people we meet the places we go the decisions we make. Those are the things that map our lives like a grid.
12. Thanks a lot for your valuable time and interest. You can include any other details you want to talk about here?
My goal in art was to get representation and I’m so happy that you appreciated what I do and decided to include me in your group of artists. I take my art seriously and have lots of ideas about future projects. My artistic goal has always been to create interesting images and to push the boundaries of abstraction.