Antoinette Lee Howard, M.A., discovered painting in the mid 1980s, when she signed up for a design class at Arizona State University. “I took the course to give more impact to my photography,” she comments, “but once I started drawing and painting, I knew I had found my way.” She also has studied art at Oregon State University, and in New England with painter Aidron Duckworth. She admires painters Georgia O’Keeffe, Wolf Kahn, Edward Betts, and Aidron Duckworth because of the way they meld vibrant color with strong, abstract form.
Her flower portraits meld her love of photography and art. She finds her subjects in formal gardens, on hiking paths, and in roadside ditches, sketchbook and camera in hand. Each painting goes through as many as eight stages, as she hones and clarifies the flower form with colored pencils, prints the colored pencil image on watercolor paper, and enhances the printed image with colored pencils, alternating this sequence until she is happy with the result. Her goal is “a flower that is both an object of art, as beautiful as the most exquisite gemstone, and an integral part of the vast unknown that is life.”
She has received Best of Show and First Place awards for her paintings, which are in collections across the country.
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