Neil Howe's Page

Website

www.neilhowe.com

Relationship status

in a relationship

College / University

B.App.Sc degree in Applied Biology, RMIT
Dip Art & Design, Prahran CAE
Dip Ed. Charles Darwin University

Member type

Artist

I am...

very much interested in environmental and political art, ie art with a message and consciousness. This is the most crucial time in all history when all artists should be focussing on current world affairs and the directions of world societies because we have a duty to inform the world and educate the masses on what really is going on. It is crunch time, rampant materialism will be our doom.

About my artwork

The images I create I call ‘BODYSCAPES’. Here I have created an alternate world in the digital domain where the human figure is transformed into a landscape that is rich in detail and varied in form and texture, a digital matrix populated by monolithic 3D organic forms existing in a black void of space bathed in the silver white light of ‘all that is’, the Creator.
In Australia, the landscape is extremely important to the indigenous people, it is old as they are also, and in stories of creation the people spirits are often equated with places and forms in the landscape. “Life on a Beach”* might be the story of a young maiden spirit who came to a beach and so liked basking in the sun on the silver sand by the waters edge that she eventually turned into the lichen covered granite boulders that populate the beach at Wilsons Promontory. In my digital world, my matrix, this can happen.
So “BODYSCAPES” is about landscapes in and of, the body. This is to do with both form and meaning and might also encompass body politics as well as politics of the body. “Sunset over Kimberley” might resemble a sunset over the rugged bluffs of the Kimberley mountains, but Kimberley is also a young woman invoking a whole range of connotations and no more so than during this current world crisis, if you get my drift.
If “Glare- Two minutes before Midnight” is that teenage glare of youth saying ‘How could YOU let this be happening’, then at one minute before midnight’ is when it all turns to the PANIC of “GAS! “* So “If Mars were a Woman” we can ask ourselves ‘would there be as many Wars’?
A little over a decade ago I was working as a video editor for a national current affairs TV program. One morning I glanced up at the satellite feed monitor and there began a war live before me. For the next year I was facing a daily barrage of images of war that I had to cut down into “entertaining and informative stories” for the nightly national news feasting. I saw images you never saw unless you were there. This is an instant electronic age, here it is all before you, EXCEPT, if it is electronic then it is controlled, is it not? What do editors do? We edit what we are told to edit. Who tells us what to edit? Corporations. Who tells the Corporations? The owners. Who are the owners and what are their motives? Is this the time to be seeking truth? Is this not an artists duty? I am concerned about the state of this world we are making. In my digital world “Nurture Our Nature” sends forth a plea from our youth to follow the love and light in your heart and please nurture our world.
I am dedicating my work to the cause of PEACE everlasting and I support artists against war. In a perfect world there should be no GREED and hence no war, let us all work towards a perfect world.
*denotes titles of artworks, see www.neilhowe.com

Artists I like

Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Miro, Brancussi

Interests

Music, photography, film, sculpture, environment

The centre of the artworld is

nowhere and everywhere

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http://www.artreview.com/profile/NeilHowe
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