Born in Gloucester, Mass., Mr. Curtis was a member of Rockport Art Association, North Shore Arts Association and New Hampshire Art Association. He is best known for marines, allegorical pieces, and murals.
There are two sides to Howard Curtis's work. He painted relatively “realistic” seascapes, moody studies of the Cape Ann, Mass. shoreline that he loved so much. And he also did more unusual, imaginative pieces which came to him unbidden and which mixed allegory and symbolism in ways that imply much more than they say.
“Some painters try to make you see what they saw. Others try to make you feel what they felt. I think feeling is the reality – and that physical details count for little. My pictures, for example, are never of any one place. They're arrangements in which everything is made to fit a particular mood. I'm interested in the solidity of the rock, the effect of the wind, the character of the sky, the force of the water. You need to have an empathy with the elements. You have to become the rocks, water, and sky, exactly as a great actor goes beyond himself in a play, speaking the lines in ways that touch the soul of his part.”
Curtis made a distinction between what he seeked– a purposeful use of intuition and accident – and the confusion often experienced by an art student. As a teacher, he found the later disturbing, for he was a firm believer in what he called the often-neglected “elements and principles of art”. These elements and principles are easily listed. “The essential elements are line, area, size, shape, value, texture, and color,” he said, counting them off on his fingers. “The basic principles are rhythm, parallelism, transition, gradation, contrast, balance, and unity.”
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