Howard Skrill

Thumbnail of Featured Art: Melting of REL and Justified Ghosts, 24” x 20” pencil and acrylic on paper mounted on board with screws and on paper mounted on board, 2026

Artist Statement: I create works on paper, framed canvases, plein-air drawings, pictorial essays and installations of stiff paper pieces mounted with screws that explore the afterlife of public figurative effigies. Remarkable vignettes arise interrogating the struggle over American identity with the raising and tearing down of effigies at the core. A decade of applying vigorous and spontaneous mark making in representations of local effigies in plein-air is applied in studio works upon a variety of supports including power inversions of my own creation. Images and installations are mounted standing alone and in combination with words; printed and digital journeys through our increasingly fractured, haunted and haunting landscape of individual and collective memory. Effigies project dominance by ascendent factions. Marginalization and erasure of others is built into effigies' very materiality. As power shifts, erasure of effigies is spectacularly enacted as is the absences and ghosts unleashed.

Portfolio Images

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