Meghan Howland

Checking out the ever-excellent art blog, I Need A Guide,  I saw a bunch of work by Meghan Howland. Howland is a Massachussetts native who now works & lives in Portland, ME.

Ennui, 2012

Howland is one of those artists who does not have a lot of online material, but I did manage to track down an artist’s statement from a couple of years back explaining her work:

It has been said that new emotions surface when we see the beauty in something that has almost been destroyed, and I agree with this.

In recent bodies of work there has always been this common origin, created though a careful and methodical undoing of the “shackles of the present”, and a retreat into the past. Both fictional and actual, biographical, and even autobiographical at times, caught in a hybrid world of fantasy and existence, of love and hate, euphoria and cruelty.

A lot of it stems from an emotional kinship, the concept of portraying and establishing communication with the excluded or neglected, the (naive), but also the exposure of the false, and the wicked.

There is also an awareness of what some say is the rotting underbelly that is our inherited world of decadence. With that said, my work sometimes references social media, fashion, and art history, representing the consequences of indulgence, greed, and sloth, and by using the powers of paint, injecting it instead with a new range of emotions, of possibilities.

– Mayo Street Arts

Lamp Light, 2012

I’m not convinced this statement applies to her newer work and without the benefit of a more recent statement to go by, I will have to rest on the fact that I simply enjoy Howland’s work visually.

Solo, 2011

More of Meghan Howland’s work can be seen on her website.

Tapes, 2011