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Dan Howe’s time machine
“Every picture begins with just a collection of good shapes,” said painter and illustrator Dan Howe, standing amid his paintings and drawings at the Kearcher-Monsell Gallery at Housatonic Valley Regional High School. The exhibit, which opened on Friday, March 7, and runs through April 10, spans decades and influences, from magazine illustration to portrait commissions to imagined worlds pulled from childhood nostalgia. The works — some luminous and grand, others intimate and quiet — show an artist whose technique is steeped in history, but whose sensibility is wholly his own.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, and trained at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Howe’s artistic foundation was built on rigorous, old-school principles. “Back then, art school was like boot camp,” he recalled. “You took figure drawing five days a week, three hours a day. They tried to weed people out, but it was good training.” That discipline led him to study under Tom Lovell, a renowned illustrator from the golden age of magazine art. “Lovell always said, ‘No amount of detail can save a picture that’s commonplace in design.’”
Training led to work. Early on, while still a graduate assistant at Syracuse University, Howe began painting portraits — chancellors, deans, and, later, an endless roster of chairmen and medical executives. It paid well, but Howe found that the job of a portraitist, even a highly skilled one, is ultimately limited. “They’re just the same thing, you know, just a guy in a suit. Later, maybe it was a girl in a suit,” said Howe.
Between commissions, he painted for himself. This show is a gathering of those moments — studies of his wife and daughters, mythic scenes painted for libraries, and Star Wars covers from his time living near Dark Horse Comics in Oregon.A large painting, originally commissioned for a library, shows a girl in an attic opening a trunk, imagination spilling into the room. The library remodeled and sent the painting back. Now it anchors a wall in the show.
Dan Howe’s work reflects the Brandywine School’s devotion to craftsmanship, narrative depth, and a luminous, almost nostalgic realism. Like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth before him, Howe builds scenes using light and composition to evoke mood and meaning. His meticulous brushwork and layering techniques nod to the tradition of classical illustration, yet his work diverges in its contemporary stillness. Of Norman Rockwell, Howe said, “He’s of my era, and our styles are similar. Of course Rockwell is Rockwell. I’ve got a little more painterly, Sargent-esque stuff running through mine.” The influence is there, not as mimicry, but as a quiet echo, refined through his own aesthetic language. “I’m an anachronism,” he said, without regret. His influences form a lineage of illustrators whose work once filled the pages of The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s. They understood, as Howe does, that a painting must be more than accurate.“Mood is everything,” said Howe, drawing a comparison between two paintings in the show — a couple by a fire — to an old Star Wars concept painting. “Same color scheme. Different world. Mood is everything.”
Teaching remains a passion for Howe. When he and his family moved to the east coast from Chicago, Howe taught a series at the Norman Rockwell Museum called “Painting Like Rockwell,” something he hopes to revive. “I like beginners,” he said. “They don’t have bad habits yet.”
Howe also runs a summer figure drawing workshop at HVRHS with an old-school approach. “You’ve just walked into a time machine — this is art school, 1965. Three hours of drawing in the morning, three in the afternoon. No cell phones.” His methods may be antiquated but the results are living proof that some things are worth preserving. “Maybe this stuff is so old it’s new again,” he mused.
As he hung his pieces for this show, Howe said teachers stopped by, connecting his images to their own memories. “That’s a success,” he said. “If a picture makes someone feel something, then it’s done its job.”
Jon Kopita reading between the lines at the David M. Hunt Library.
Jon Kopita’s work, with its repetitive, meticulous hand-lettering, is an exercise in obsession. Through repetition, words become something else entirely — more texture than text. Meaning at once fades and expands as lines, written over and over, become a meditation, a form of control that somehow liberates.
“I’m a rule follower, so I like rules, but I also like breaking them,” said Kopita, as we walked through his current exhibit, on view at the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village until March 20.
In 2007, Kopita and his husband, Olaf, an architect, took a trip to The Vitra Design Museum outside of Basel, Switzerland. Kopita found himself infuriated by the pomp surrounding the collection of what were once utilitarian objects, now absurdly canonized. “The irony is that a lot of that furniture was designed to be mass produced, taking really good design and making it accessible to middle class people,” Kopita explained. “It wasn’t supposed to be something so special.” Upon returning home, Kopita began repeatedly writing, “I hate Vitra” on lined paper. Channeling his frustration, he wrote the simple statement 100 times and through the act, found a cathartic release. “It harkened back to when you’re in school and you have to write out, ‘I will not speak in class’ or something 100 times on the black board.” Except for Kopita, what was meant to be disciplinary was not only a contemplative practice, but a healing act.“For me, the experience of repetitive writing became meditative and cathartic, more of an exorcism of thoughts rather than something either punitive or tedious.”
His current show at the library includes work spanning a decade, with many of the pieces created during the COVID-19 pandemic. An educator for over 30 years, Kopita found he had time and space during the pandemic to really investigate his process and to create work in volume.“I did 40 works during the first 150 days,” he said. The early pieces were instructional in nature with words like “wash hands,” “social distancing,” and “zoom” but soon began morphing into existential inquiry —with questions like “is this all there is?” repeating like a dark mantra. Some are reminders of the stark political divisions that emerged during those days. There is a tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement with names repeated in grief: George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The whole display, Kopita delights, demands something that feels almost radical in today’s digital age: slowness. “This is a difficult show because you really have to stop and process. It asks people to read.”
In many ways, Kopita has spent a lifetime questioning the boundaries imposed on him, both literal and figurative. “90% of going to school is a hazing system where you’re just learning how to write between the lines — these are the rules.” He felt the pressure of conformity from an early age. His own father had expectations for him: a stable corporate job, health insurance, a 401k. Kopita tried it for a year and a half.“It was like my boss was saying, ‘if you work really hard, you can have what I have.’” Kopita took one look at “what he had”— a suburban house, a company car —and thought, “Yeah, I don’t want this at all.” He moved to New York, got a job in a Soho gallery, and never looked back. “I know really well firsthand what it means to step across the line and try to do things differently and do things on your own terms.”
In his piece, “Transition,” Kopita grapples with the fluidity of identity, a structured yet random exercise where “he” gradually transforms into “she.”
“There’s so much going on right now with ideas of gender and what gender means, a kind of war on how people identify,” he said. “There are days where I’m 100% he, and then maybe there are days where I’m more she.” The work, much like his larger practice, is about change, about pushing against the expected, about honoring the beauty in what falls outside the lines.
Kopita is fascinated by the tension between order and deviation, by the way small shifts — whether in handwriting, identity, or thought — can carve out new landscapes. But for all its rigor, Kopita’s work is not about control. It’s about surrender. The act of writing, for him, is like a river cutting through rock, shaping itself as it moves. “I think of it as how the words carve up the paper. So, it actually becomes a three-dimensional exercise in my head at times.” It is discipline as liberation, structure as rebellion, a practice that turns the most mundane act — writing the same word over and over — into something sacred.
Patton Oswalt
Comedian and actor Patton Oswalt is well known for his standup routine as well as his roles in film and television. Oswalt made his acting debut in the Seinfeld episode, “The Couch” and has appeared in “Parks and Rec,” “Reno 911,” “Modern Family,” and “A.P. Bio.” He has done voice-over work for movies including “Ratatouille,” and had his own Netflix special. “Patton Oswalt: Talking for Clapping.”
Oswalt will present his unique brand of humor in a show titled “Effervescent” at the Mahaiwe Theater in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on Saturday, March 22. With sardonic style, he makes keen observations about American culture and gives biting critiques of the current administration.
In a recent interview with the Lakeville Journal, Oswalt said,
“Things are so dark. It feels like they’re depending on craziness to bulldoze their stuff in. So, I’m using absurdity and almost surrealism to battle it. I also realize that when you’re coming into a show like this, you want some escape. It’s certainly not the whole set.”
“Politics used to be about getting stuff off of your plate so that you can live. Now it wants to dominate the news cycle and everyone’s emotions. So, in a weird way, comedy is an act of defiance,” he added.
Comedians like Richard Pryor and, more recently, Dave Chappelle pushed boundaries of taste and limits. George Carlin was quoted as saying, “I think it’s the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.” So, how far is too far and who decides?
“When you became a comedian, you signed up for having the ground continually cut from underneath you. That’s the deal you made. Comedy is an ephemeral art that doesn’t age very well, and you have to embrace that,” Oswalt said.
In recent years, political correctness has restrained the growth of comedy and free speech. Today, the pendulum seems to have swung in the opposite direction to the far right.
So, are there funny right-wing comedians?
“There have been comedians who are more conservative in their outlook, but they don’t make it their identity. I know some comedians who are right wing but are still good at doing comedy. It’s not that right wing comedians aren’t funny, it’s that there’s a lot of right wing people who think that they deserve to be funny. The failed comedian to right wing grifter pipeline is pretty short,” Oswalt said.
And how about politicians who think they’re funny and use their pulpit to bully?
“You have to know how to be funny. Fast forward to people who just want to break boundaries and are just cruel. They don’t understand what comedy is. The nightmare that Elon is putting us through is all because he wants to be cool, and he’s not. So, he’s gonna blow up the world. That’s an oversimplification, but it’s also accurate. He’s like the kid whose dad owns the rec-center and thinks that all the kids should like him, but he’s obnoxious and mean so no one wants to hang out with him,” Oswalt said.
Like many comedians, Oswalt tests out new material in small clubs and open mics. When asked if he receives any pushback on his politically pointed jokes, Oswalt said, “When you go out in the world, people are just kind of the same. I’m never saying anything that’s unreasonable, even when I’m making fun of stuff like religion, conservatism and especially, fascism. It’s not in a way that people can say, ‘No, wait a minute, fascism’s good!’ unless they’re just trolling.”
At this point in his career, Oswalt has developed his own fans who come to see him. He wins crowds over by staying welcoming of everyone.
“I’m a big believer that if you treat audiences with respect, they’ll come and meet you. I’m always excited to be in front of people,” he added.
With surprise as a key element to any new show, Oswalt won’t divulge the nature of his new act, but he guarantees it will feature new material.
“Look at how accelerated the news has gotten. Who knows what I’ll be talking about by the time I get to Great Barrington!” he said.
For tickets to Patton Oswalt’s show, go to: mahaiwe.org
