SIGMA SURFACING - Key Persons
"Art is a way of looking at the world and the Artist has a responsibility to tell a certain kind of truth." -Howard Newman
Howard Newman is a painter, sculptor and restoration artist born and raised in New York. His is also an incredible conversationalist whose work is about telling stories. His interests are rooted in science and philosophy, language, technology and the mysterious ways in which we operate within this world. Near a lush garden with cats sleeping beside bronze figures, Howard's studio is in the garage of the home he shares with wife and collaborator, Mary.
He studied Architecture, Cultural Anthropology and Classical Literature at Miami University of Ohio before he received an MFA in Metalsmithing from the Rhode Island School of Design, where he studied with his mentor John Prip.
Howard was awarded a Fulbright Scholar Grant in Italy where he and Mary lived in a 15th century farmhouse south of Florence. There he made his first bronze sculptures using foundries all over Tuscany. He returned to Providence where he was soon being collected and shown in galleries, gathering attention from critics and museums.
For the over thirty years he has created bronzes based on his studies in architecture, anthropology, design, and metalsmithing. His fascination with the way things work drive his own personal path of intellectual questioning and finding solutions.
"One of the biggest problems of being an artist, is one has to make a living. At the same time, making that living has to be secondary to being an artist. It's a balance of understanding the business and the business of making art. If you are going to be an artist, one of the saddest things are the people who do only the business end and sacrifice their essential spirits. So the real question is, How big is your spirit?" -Howard
During the 1980s-1990s, Howard taught one class a year in various departments at The Rhode Island School of Design where he encouraged his students to build analytical constructions through critical observation.
"Change is the only constant. Artist has to be good and very adept at changing. If you are very good at changing, then you are set to be an artist." -Howard
Howard's work combines elements of human figures and machines into interlocking geometric shapes, ranging from machinelike Futurism to deconstructed human shapes. There is precision along with revealing the marks of original development in clay.
"My sculpture and drawing focused heavily on my love of refinement. But the more expressive vocabulary of wax modeling and my increasing use of color was radically expanding my vocabulary. It was then that I began making paintings." -Howard
Howard Newman‘s early training was in Architecture at Miami University of Ohio where, after three years of studying Design, Engineering and Structures, he came to understand the primacy of a liberal arts education. After completing an open project in 1963 for which he designed a self sustaining moon station, and for which he received the department's highest grade, Howard left the Department of Architecture to study Anthropology and Sociology. In February of his senior year's first semester final exams he and Mary eloped in a raging snowstorm. That summer he received his BA from Miami. After graduation, Howard and Mary entered Peace Corps training in a Special Forces training camp in Arecibo, Porto Rico, where the two learned fluent Spanish and Survival Training - how to be tied up and survive in deep water, to belay from the top of a two-hundred foot high dam, and to survive in the jungle.