California modernist - surrealist oil painting, circa 1965, by well-listed African-American artist, Raymond Howell.

Oil on stretched canvas. Framed. Signed, lower left. Label affixed to the stretcher bar from Art Associates West Gallery (Raymond Howells Gallery).

This work, like many Raymond Howell works from this period, is complex in subject, composition, perspective, and meaning. Masterful brushwork and layered painting technique. Raymond Howell was a unique artist and his paintings range in style from realism to surrealism and from modernist to impressionist. His subject matter is often urban and figural in nature. Howells surrealist works, from the 1950s through the 1980s, show a fantasy world of beauty and drama set in urban landscapes and are considered to be among the finest California Surrealist School paintings of the era. This painting is a fine example of his work and from his most important period. Museum quality California modernism.

PAINTING - 14" x 18"

FRAME - 19 1/4" x 23 1/4"

PROVENANCE : California collection.

NOTES / REFERENCES : Raymond Howell (1931 - 2002). Raymond Howell was born in Oakland, California and became interested in art during elementary school. He had a difficult youth, leaving public school by the fifth grade and living in a series of foster homes and reform schools. He was mostly self-educated, both academically and artistically. By the age of thirty he was supporting himself by selling his work. In the 1960s Howell founded Art Associates West which was a combined art gallery and art school in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Throughout his life he maintained an interest in teaching young people and was a founding member and teacher, as well as the director of Project Dare, an art school for minority and poor children in San Francisco. Raymond Howell died on January 6, 2002, the same day that an exhibition of 14 of his recent paintings opened at the Oakland Museum.

Exhibitions: the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco; "Negro In American Art", Kaiser Center, Oakland; "Black American Artists" Exhibition, 1971, Chicago; the Los Angeles International Black Art Show; The Oakland Museum; University of California, Berkeley Black Art Festival 1970 (first prize). In addition, his works are held in museum collections, important private collections of California and African - American art.

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Good undamaged, original condition with no previous restorations. Modern frame in good condition.Please see description and photographs.