Artist Statement

In art school I  flirted with abstraction, then mystical surrealism, and (my mother having been half German) the Teutonic theme of Death and the Maiden. After I'd graduated, I had experiences which led me to more deeply explore love and loss. I even lowered my resistance to what had been popular in art school, and bought myself a model skeleton. I called him Fred, and we belatedly got down into painting "dem bones" for a time. This made it easier for me to give up resisting another wildly popular artistic subject: birds (see below). I finally had to admit and accept that I am a frustrated naturalist at heart, and that San Francisco, with its many parks and the surrounding Bay Area, is well suited to this.

Awareness of the climate crisis pulled my concerns back to the here and now, yet my preoccupations with nature, love, and death remain present throughout most of my work.

On Garden Variety:

While I was helping my mum-in-law tidy up her London flat, my eye was caught by several photographs^†of birds, which were featured in a section of a newspaper in the recycling bin. Somewhat absurdly, I felt I had to save these stunning beauties, and so I tore out the pages and brought them back home, compelled to paint them all. Next in line were a variety of bees, since I was working with beeswax encaustics, then cardinals, a few caterpillars, butterflies, a mouse (although maybe it's a baby rat), plus a dragonfly. The backgrounds of each painting reveal hints of potential or actual loss of habitat: a ghostly image of a branch, a nest, a cavity in a tree, a honeycombed hive, an abandoned bird and house. Added decorative papers suggest the domesticity of wallpaper, or perhaps the gesture of a wrapped gift; elements of the human. Bits of gold leaf evoke its ancient use in sacred icons, striving to elevate the image beyond the ordinary.

My photographic skills being inadequate, I asked permission from professional photographers to use their images of various creatures as my models. Most were kindly obliging, asking only that I be sure to give them a photo credit, which I have gladly done†. With coinciding concerns about global threats to bees and other pollinators, my Garden Variety series evolved into deeper meditations on the nature around us and our global responsibility to protect as much of it as we possibly can.

With these photographs for reference, I paint my subjects in oils, and then go back over them with pen and ink, and/or colored pencils, atop a background of encaustic wax, with which I first build up many layers over custom birch wood panels. I incorporate scraps of papers, feathers and other found objects, plus torn bits of gold leaf to evoke such dreamlike, fantastical, yet largely invisible activities as I might imagine during the creative process. Much of this happens beyond my conscious control, which creates frustration, chaos, or "happy accidents" along the way.

Here is my artist statement on ArtSpan's website.

† Deep appreciation to anyone who can provide photography credits for any of the non-credited images I have painted!

____________________

A more personal statement on the Celtic series from the archives:

(2000) Deborah Howard-Page
B.F.A., 1993, San Francisco Art Institute

I found myself researching and contemplating the roles that nature has played in ancient mythologies, and how we all yearn for connection to nature. Through such studies, and often while listening to music, I've been motivated to make my art.

The wax encaustic mixed media works combine pigmented beeswax, oil paint, colored pencils, pen and ink, found objects (bones, leaves, insect wings), and/or pastels, on wood panel supports. Often I make a sketch or study, particularly for figurative and portrait work, but the rest comes into being through process. At times an element of chance will lead me in a direction quite different than what I had originally intended. This is both terrifying and exciting.

I delved into the nature muse by reading The White Goddess by Robert Graves. Here's that story:

In the 1970's I had given the book to my father, John Howard (a former Hollywood actor who later became a Waldorf high school English/drama teacher).  Around this time our family would gather every week, filled with anticipation, to watch every single episode of the British production of Graves' "I, Claudius" together, when it first aired on public television in Los Angeles. 

At the time I'd given the book to my dad I had no interest in reading it myself. But after he died I pulled it off his bookshelf, suddenly curious: he'd bookmarked over fifty pages with paper-clips! As I began to explore his odd bookmarks I got hooked. And the next thing I knew I was spellbound.‡

The Sacred Grove Series started with photographs I took of certain trees and Celtic ruins during travels in Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and England. Like my Celtic Knot paintings, it centers upon the symbolism of ancient Celtic tree-worship, invoking the spirit of Taliesin, the Sacred Grove, the "roebuck in the thicket." Although it resembles the Virgin Mary, Urania, Brizo of Delos got its title from The White Goddess.