How’s paintings consciously and consistently blur the line between the seen and the unseen. The landscape is captured in recognisable form for a tangible visual experience, but the artist tempers this vision with what he terms “organic abstraction” to create space for emotive thoughts. A self-taught painter, he manipulates scenes captured as en plein air studies with profound sensitivity, tracing not only the anatomy of place but its sentiment and spirit. These paintings traverse landscapes that hold the memories, traditions, culture and hope of First Nations people in Tasmania including Yingina, Leeawulena and Titikalangrruni Country. To truly capture the atmosphere, light and colour of the moment, How immerses himself in the landscape – journeying into the Central Plateau and Highlands and the Tarkine Wilderness and rainforest, with a tent, sleeping bag and backpack full of paints, brushes, sketchbooks and small boards.

In works such as Organism and Myrtle Garden, How’s mastery of light, texture and tone hatch a fragrant, damp atmosphere that can be discernibly felt and smelt. Mossy greens and icy greys create a sensorial briskness as the cool purity of the Tasmanian air fills our lungs. The viewer, solitary, is engulfed by the flora, diminutive and humbled. The crystalline skin of a cool stream conceals ancient secrets that the forest will never divulge, while trunks and roots spill off the canvas, reaching for things out of sight. This alluring current of mystery is continued in the panoramic work The Bend, Pine Valley Forest, where the forest’s wisdom is etched into the sprawling mats of omniscient moss, and the eternal trees that watch on with a cavernous quietude, making us conscious of our own breath, our own heartbeat.

There is a coolness to the works in ‘A Fragile Strength’ – not merely weather-wise (certainly these landscapes dance between Winter and Spring), but the way they carry themselves slowly, quietly, sensitively. How’s generous swathes of paint are scraped back in the foreground of Pause and Reflect – Near the Summit, demarcating the foliage and hinting at a personal process of revelation. In the distance, spectral lakes linger like apparitions on the verge of vanishing, melting into the mountains and sky with soft ethereality.   

Always devoid of people, or human indication, How’s works are a meditation on our place in nature. They prompt us to contemplate, in the artist’s words, how “we are very small in the scheme of things, and that these untamed places will exist beyond us. They demand to be cherished and protected. The intensity and volatility of Tasmania’s weather cannot be understated. The artist explains that ‘weather rolls in and changes the feeling of a place’ and that the overriding drive of the series was a desire to ‘enable people to feel that, who hadn’t experienced it before’.

Moments of stillness, flux and fury are rendered with profound sensitivity, sustained by a mastery of light. Dawn glow deftly recreates the oily opalescence of a tarn at first light, whilst Southerly front captures the intensity of a low-pressure system sweeping across a plateau, the downpour gently illuminated in the distance. Winters departure on Cradle Mountain signifies the changing of the seasons - a gentle stream of snowmelt guides the viewers’ eyes across a drenched and dormant ridge. The weather and the terrain are inextricably linked. How describes the landforms and flora as having been ‘brought to life and battered into shape by eons of weather patterns’. This relationship is discernible in such works as The land and the sky seemed to coalesce and I watched as the ancient face disappeared, where earth and sky melt into one another.

There is a poetry to How’s titles that generously expands the experience of his paintings. For the ‘Antipodean Light’ series, he introduced a novel naming convention, referencing sounds as a means of creating multi-dimensionality. ‘I found that adding to the pure visuals allowed another sense to kick in, bringing the scenes to life‘, How explains. In I was awoken by the currawongs and Frog chorus II, the songs of unseen creatures are evoked, effectively transporting the viewer to a palpable, intimate moment in nature. The silence was broken animates the scene of a cascading waterfall with recollections of crashing water and the fragrant, damp atmosphere of the Tasmanian rainforest. The viewer experiences an upwelling of nostalgia for a place they’ve never been. 

The ‘Antipodean Light’ paintings possess a grounding and restorative quality. The environments are consciously devoid of people or human intervention, lending a timelessness that expresses a quiet and ancient power. The works are a meditation on our place in nature. How reflects that ‘we are quite small in the scheme of things and these places will exist beyond us’. They must be cherished and protected.