Howard Behrens Biography

Biography

Howard Behrens

Howard Behrens is a man of many contrasts. Tall, strikingly good-looking with a dignified self-assurance, Behrens is at the same time boyish and vulnerable. He began drawing with crayons when the world around him was colored by the darkness of the Great Depression -- and he never stopped. For nearly seven decades his life has been defined by light, color, line, and texture. From crayons to sketch pads to experimenting with paint, the world of visual art has been this artist's driving passion.

"Everybody starts off drawing. All young kids have a sense of art and a desire to draw in the beginning," Behrens says, "but I just never stopped."

Classically trained and intensely focused, Howard Behrens' paintings are dramatic, intense, alive with color and texture -- and unique in his preference of the palette knife over the paintbrush. He hasn't picked up a paintbrush since 1976, when he made an experimental leap to an entirely different artistic technique.

By the mid-seventies, Behrens was in his forties, well established as an illustrator and graphic designer, yet he continued to use weekends and nights to paint, experimenting with color, technique, and style.

"When I had free time I used to go to the art museums and copy paintings to figure out what the artist had done," Behrens recalls. "I wanted to know the relationship between texture, line, shape, and light -- and I just kept painting. I couldn't stop painting.

"But one fact always puzzled me. The color of the paint on the palette was so much brighter, more exciting than the paint on the canvas. In 1976 when I had just returned from a three week trip to the western United States, I decided to try applying the colors directly onto the painting with my palette knife -- the handheld metal tool usually used to mix and blend paints. It was easier for me to be freer with the subject matter of the western landscape. Wide open spaces. Wandering riverbeds. Brilliant cloud formations. The western landscape lent itself to being more spontaneous -- and using the palette knife instead of the brush allowed me to work with the paint much more quickly while retaining the pure, vivid color of the paints. I was hooked. I've been applying the colors directly onto my paintings with a palette knife ever since."

A MAN OF CONTRASTS

He paints, but doesn't use brushes.
His paintings capture the glory of sunlight, but only by painstaking attention to shadow.
His work has been called a "romance with the sun," yet he rarely paints outdoors.
His style is one of "controlled spontaneity," yet the images he captures on canvas are at once deliberate and well conceived.

Considered the master of the palette knife technique, Behrens has perfected the use of this flat triangular metal tool that has more in common with a putty knife than a paintbrush. A rather unyielding, inflexible instrument, particularly when compared to the soft flexibility of brushes, the palette knife gave Behrens the artistic freedom he was looking for.

"With brushes, I couldn't get enough paint down fast enough. Palette knife painting forces me to be free, spontaneous, and allows me to work fast, without losing the creative energy that inspired me in the first place," Behrens says. "When I started painting with the knife, I no longer belabored painstaking details."

His decision to work with a palette knife to apply undiluted paints directly to the canvas marked a definable turning point in his career. With the knife, he found the technique that could keep up with his creative energy, a technique that uses so much paint he's virtually sculpting on canvas with strokes of a knife.