Painting

By the age of 15, Busser Howell had lost 98 percent of his vision. The remaining 2 percent of his eyesight disappeared at age 40. Despite this visual impairment, Howell pursued a career as a painter and sculptor. Before this diagnosis of progressive blindness, Howell used time spent at hospitals learning how to use watercolors and pastels. He later studied at Boston University’s School of Fine Arts. After his vision was gone, he remained determined to keep producing art: “I still didn’t stop painting. I just changed the process that I use.” That process relied on Howell’s ability to visualize the work in his mind and then allow his instincts to lead his paintbrushes.

Howell experienced the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center from the beach on Fire Island, New York. He felt overcome with fear as a friend began to describe the clouds of smoke and collapse of the Twin Towers. The wind soon carried the smell of the disaster east over Long Island. The sensation reminded him of anxiety he had felt in childhood during air-raid drills at school prompted by the Cold War-era threat of  nuclear bombing. Both in his youth and on the Fire Island beach that September morning, Howell worried about what would happen next.

Before 9/11, Howell had been working on a series of wire sculptures depicting ballet dancers. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, he put aside these whimsical creations and switched to painting on tar paper, a substance more typically used as a roofing material in construction. This unconventional medium added a rough texture to his art, reflecting his feelings of shock, anger, and pain. In Never Forget 2, Howell revisited a triptych abstraction he first painted in 2002. For this three-panel composition he employed different shades of blue applied over the tar-paper substrate to imitate the reflection of the sky in the facades of the aluminum-clad Twin Towers. He recalled this reflective phenomenon from visits he had made to lower Manhattan when the World Trade Center was under construction and he still retained part of his vision.