Catherine Howe (b. 1959, Buffalo, New York) is a New York–based painter whose lush, gestural works occupy the territory between representation and abstraction. Her paintings and monotypes combine fluid gestures, sensuous color, and experimental materials. Howe’s work, though it visually recalls 17th‑century still lifes, is ultimately about the material act of painting rather than depiction or narrative. What first appears to be flowers, figures, or food dissolves on closer inspection into swirling brushwork and layered color, so that recognizable motifs quickly give way to abstraction.
Her prints carry this same fascination with materiality, gesture, and baroque excess into monotype and related print processes. She treats printmaking not as a secondary, reproductive practice, but as another arena for dense surfaces, improvisation, and still‑life‑like imagery that hovers between suggestion and abstraction.
In recent years, Howe has developed monotypes using acrylic on paper, sometimes working without a traditional press and inventing ways to transfer paint that retain the fluidity and immediacy of her marks. These prints often feature gestural, botanical forms and layered color that echo historical still lifes while remaining non‑narrative, emphasizing the sensual behavior of pigment across the surface.
Other projects, including collagraphic monoprints, heighten texture and relief by building raised matrices that hold pools, scrapes, and swirls of ink or paint, echoing the thickly worked passages of her paintings. Across these series, her use of splattering, spilling, wiping, and layering ensures that each impression functions as a unique object, allowing conventional ideas of the edition to give way to singular, materially charged images.
