A Hug From The Art World is pleased to announce Howie Michels’ Epic
The exhibition will be on view from September 15th through October 29th at A Hug From The Art World, 515 West 19th Street, New York, NY, 10011
Howie Michels’ first painting was done, in the 1950s, in his mother’s lipstick, on the pink wall of their house on a strawberry farm in Middletown, New York. It was an image of a gun, which his parents mistook for a penis, and he was punished. After that he had nightmares of glowing snakes chasing him down an endless set of dark stairs.
He attended Pratt Institute, where Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were among his friends. After college, he worked as the clinical director of a home for schizophrenic children and taught grade school art. In 1978, he and the writer Francine Prose had the first of two sons and moved to the Catskills.
Michels has never stopped painting with neither the encouragement nor the influence of a conventional art career. His supporters and collectors have mostly been poets, writers, and other artists. Over the last few years, the images that had always been lurking around the barn and the 17th century cabin where Howie Michels works, depending on the season, suddenly exploded across these larger, wilder, more ambitious works. They are complicated, masterfully rendered landscapes of the region between the hilarious and the alarming, between the good-naturedly erotic and the post-apocalyptic nightmare, between the churning sea and the boat saving us from the churning sea.
They call to mind an unlikely pantheon: R. Crumb, Max Beckmann, Gustave Courbet, and especially Hieronymus Bosch, in whose paintings you can lose yourself and feel a gravitational shift. Subtly and directly, these brave paintings speak to us about fish and birds, turtles and snakes, the body, sex, violence, salvation, dimension, capitalism, humor, art history, personal history, mystery and above all the bright free combination of imagination and skill.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
He has illustrated five books of poems: Witt, (Gotham Book Mart, 1973) by Patti Smith, Aunt Lettuce, Let Me Look Under Your Skirt, (Bloomsbury, 2005) and Night Picnic, (Houghton Mifflin, 2012, both by Charles Simic, and Pallbearers Envying The One Who Rides, (Penguin, 1999)and The Porcupine’s Kisses, (Penguin, 2002) both by Stephen Dobyns, also a limited edition of Peter Straub’s Koko (Centipede Press.) He has shown at the 55 Mercer Street Gallery (1990); at the Bowery Poetry Club “On the Wall”, curated by Elizabeth Murray; Rental Gallery, group show, 2020, curated by David Salle.