Howard Skrill

Location:  17 Berkeley Place 1R
Website:  howardskrill.blogspot.com
Instagram: skrillhoward

A bronze statue of a mounted warrior, staring forward, is perched upon an enormous base of pristine white stone in a central square of a city. The monument towers over individuals reduced to the size of ants under the warrior’s lofty gaze as they weave their way around his monumental presence. The warrior is celebrated for violence, often undertaken against the very communities passing within his shadow. Violence that successfully privileges the lives of some passing below him and proscribing the lives of others. This order, seemingly as long lived as the bronze of the warrior’s cast likeness and the stone of his enormous perch, persisting for generations and appearing to those below as the natural order of things. My art practice, the Anna Pierrepont Series (howardskrill.blogspot.com), has for over a decade, been documenting these presences in plein-air and studio works on paper. The social order they exist to inscribe is becoming unmoored with striking rapidity. My project evolving to address this epochal transformation. The proscribed are increasingly seizing monuments from the privileged, pouring out grief and hope in equal measuring upon the formally pristine surfaces of these presences with paint and pen that I am documenting in the Anna Pierrepont Series as extraordinary tableaux vivant.

I am a long time member of Park Slope Windsor Terrace Artists and a long term resident of Park Slope Brooklyn where I live with my wife and PSWT artist member, Mary Cuddihee Skrill.