untitled (self-portrait) 95 - 03 | march 22 - april 19 2003

Heward Makes His Mark
Globe and Mail | Gallery Going | March 29, 2003
By GARY MICHAEL DAULT

Heward makes his mark

In John Heward's last exhibition at Toronto's Peak Gallery, almost exactly one year ago, the Montreal artist showed a selection of his trademark rayon tarpaulins. The show was called Edge and Heward passed pretty close to it with this gathering of loosely hung, banner-like paintings which sometimes consisted of nothing more than, in a painting like Untitled (EDGES/yellow) , a small yellow rectangle on a grimy, unprimed field, energized by certain exquisitely positioned stains and adhesions of dust.

This new exhibition is made up of self-portraits. You mustn't press them, however, for accurate anatomical or metaphysical revelation. You can gaze forever at one of these exquisite paintings and still pass John Heward on the

street without recognizing him. But that is not, of course, the point. There are lots of ways of getting to the core of the self, and Heward's way is one of them: stand before a blank surface with a dripping brush in your hand and close the gap between you and the canvas. Whatever marks you make there will, if you're lucky, be you. And your marks, if you're lucky, won't be like anybody else's. You will thus have committed a self-portrait, will you not?

The thing about these Heward self-portraits (which have apparently been in process, off and on, since 1995) is that while they offer his characteristically raw swipes and thrusts of acrylic or alkyd enamel paint on rayon or canvas, those raw swipes and thrusts now sometimes jostle themselves into shapes that seem clearly to be heads-heads with eyes therein, with mouths sometimes, with ears. And there is more colour here than I've ever seen before from Heward-lots of molten reds, oranges, salmons and corals, yellows: the colours of living flesh heated by the pulse-beat of life. Sometimes-often-the paintings have been painted on one side and then hung so the "back" is facing the viewer. This means that what you're looking at is bleed-through. It's as if Heward wanted to soften the savage urgency of the primary act of painting by distancing it from us, by filtering it through the same surface where it first happened.

Could a younger man (Heward is sixty-nine) have made these paintings? I doubt it. There is a lifetime of self-awareness embodied within these deftly raucous slashings and slatherings, the effulgence of a sensibility a half century in the making radiating through these exhilarating drips and smudges.