Howard
Berelson

Paintings

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Death in the Garden of Eden
Oldupai Gorge, Serengeti Plain, Tanzania
Giclee Print
Image size: 24" x 24"
on 30" x 30"  Somerset Velvet

I attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. During those years, I learned how to fabricate and weld as an apprentice with Theodore Roszak, American sculptor.  I received my Bachelor of Industrial Design from Pratt Institute in 1962. I left the field of industrial design in 1968 and became an illustrator of children’s books, both trade and text. In 1989 I studied printmaking and discovered personal vision. I am a permanent roster teaching artist for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Art in Education Program, teaching in the metropolitan area for over 17 years. I am married to my treasure Suzanne for thirty-four years.

From dark to light: The transition from children’s book illustrator to printmaker (monoprints) to artist in residence to digital printmaker spanned about forty years. I left the field of children’s book illustration to find my direction. Under the guidance of printmaker Roberto De Lamonica, I discovered my voice.

I created about fifty individual monoprints. The images were more like a sustained scream as the demons became visualized. These were exhibited numerous times as one person exhibitions, group exhibitions and gallery representation. At the end of this cycle I was depleted of images and the need to exorcise them.

During this time, my wife, Suzanne, brought me into her kindergarten class for a “show and tell.” Showing my children’s book illustrations to children, explaining to them how they were conceived and more importantly, listening to their natural inquisitiveness and openness had literally changed my life. They represented those parts of me that I had carefully placed away years ago. As a result of this experience, I became a teaching artist for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Art in Education Program and have continued this involvement for the past fourteen years; I am now a permanent roster artist.

What the children had given me was the way in which to find my own childhood once again, perhaps for the first time. I have learned greatly from their innocence, their unfiltered, talented, inquisitive young minds that so willingly entered into their own world of imagination with their unabashed joy and exuberance.

The present series of digital works reflect that joy of discovery. I have learned from what I teach; the four basic visual elements--shape, size, color, and texture--are now translated into swirls of shapes, pattern, and color. The demons that were once a torment have been transformed into constructions of size, shape and color; they are now gardens, landscapes masks and totems. This is what the children have taught me. 

The Garden Series and Landscape Series reflect my involvement with our gardens at home; we cultivate them, we tend them, and, very much like what Dr. Pangloss said in the end of Candide, “We must tend to our own gardens,” and that I do.

There are many aspects to a life, and I have realized that our lives are a tapestry; they warp and weave tenuously holding together those bits of experience and memory, both filled with darkness as well as light. The tapestry of our lives is one whole fabric.     

All the text and images published on the Piermont Flywheel Gallery web site are for personal use only and are not for use in the public domain. You may not re-use any text or image in any other publication or for any commercial use.   Reproduction, redistribution, or exploitation is strictly prohibited.  Copyright © 2010 Piermont Flywheel Gallery