by Robert Knafo
Think about how much of Abstract Expressionism was about large, dark, “signature” forms composed against a relatively light ground.

Motherwell asked his black oblongs to stand for an act of political mourning (specifically to memorialize his feelings over the fate of the Spanish Republic). Clyfford Still’s looming, sliding, obsidian slabs and stalactites seem to offer a kind of particularly apt mineralogical metaphor for a hugely ambitious, grandiose—mountainous—personality. Rothko invested his hovering, soft-cornered quadrants with the melancholy radiance, immateriality, and irreducibility of some otherwise unattainable state of grace.

One could go on: Hans Hoffman, Franz Kline, Philip Guston…with each of these artists we find ourselves investing abstract vocabularies with some significance of both biographical and cultural resonance. In each case a symbolic system with defining and distinctive formal characteristic—shape, color, composition—but lacking any conventional representational specificity, is enlisted in the expression of the experience, consciousness, values, and character of the artist.

Why we are ready to read, or rather, misread—or if you prefer, interpret subjectively—abstract painted shapes as meaning this, or that; why we are conscious of empathetically “feeling along” with the artist, and, in a sense, reliving what the artist thought and felt and expressed as the image arose on the canvas; why we’re ready to do all that would, I think, take the combined powers of an art historian, a poet, a linguist, a psychologist, a cultural anthropologist and a neurobiologist to fully figure out. In any event, we do identify with what the artist means—if, that is, we sense that the artist means it authentically.

When I first stood with Busser Howell in front of his paintings, he let me know that he’d been prompted to use tar paper in his paintings out of the shock of 9/11. Large jagged shards of dense mineral-black paper, conventionally used as a roofing material in construction, frame and shroud and slash through these compositions. The shards of tar paper both frame and explode into the “body” of the canvas, setting off certain visual tremors: connotations of shock, pain, anger, revulsion, grief, sorrow, instability, anxiety.—a register of emotions appropriate to and evocative of the inspiring event.

Tar paper brings a stark black and readily manipulable compositional material into the creative equation that also allows the artist to express his response to a traumatic event on the personal and collective level. It also reflects the artist’s long personal and professional involvement in construction and home restoration. The shards overlap a surface of painting that most typically connotes a general, sketchy sense of landscape, or architectural construction. We’re at the intersection of the “natural,” stable order, and something profoundly unstable and disordering.

Active as an artist for over 40 years, Busser Howell was influenced deeply by the pictorial legacy and ethos of Abstract Expressionism. (His first and most formative teacher worked in an Abstract Expressionist style.) Howell is not sighted—he lost his vision as the result of illness as a teenager. Blindness, however, has not barred him from a prolific career as a painter, nor from developing a new compositional format and pictorial vocabulary over the last two years since 9/11. Howell has effectively, authentically used this new vocabulary to do “the work of mourning”—a crucial thing that artists do, both for themselves and on our behalf.