“Charles Howard has been painting for over 30 years on the Greek island of Skyros.

Here, in Skyros, Myth seems to flourish alongside the Greek Orthodox faith, its spirits lodging in familiar domestic objects, in the rocks, pine trees and the blue sea…

During the Renaissance, in order to paint a particular moment, when figures are in a particular place with the sun casting particular shadows, painters introduced perspective, the modeling of form, shadows and chiaroscuro. Charles Howard, by returning to the pre-Renaissance principle, like Matisse, allows the moment to become timeless, eliding it into the past, present and future. Freed from the constraints of this momentary realism, colours and their tones can form surprising relationships: purple and brown; lime green, blue and red: delicious, mat colour, like sun-faded walls and things lying in random juxtaposition on a table. Mountains become abstract zigzags, the pattern on a carpet or the orange and red lozenges of a ziggurat. Geometry and pattern is set against the youthful, organic shape of the figure or allowed to float in pure abstract form. A painting of a footballer takes off out of the moment into timelessness as well.
Charles Howard puts together in a painting his own vocabulary of imagery: a red sail and red lips, a blue moon and a blue coffee cup, a star and the collection of stars that make up the Town on the hill, the large and the small, the near and the far, all on the picture plane in a balanced composition that links personal memories with an ancient past.” - Annie Harris, The Royal Academy, London