Bio:
Howard Neufeld is an artist who most often refers to himself as a painter. This goes back to an event that happened a long time ago that he calls his "conversion experience," when he knew that he was to become a painter.
A few years ago he retired from a career of teaching college-level painting, drawing, and printmaking. Always the experimenter, he has occasionally used combinations of "real" images with "abstract" forms in printmaking. He sees both as capable of representing Reality.
After a life-time of working in various media, influence has come from a variety of sources including other artists and the theoretical discourse surrounding their work. His strongest has been Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and the theory of abstraction revealed in the articulate writings he left behind. For this reason Mr. Neufeld sees Kandinsky as a mentor of sorts, who built his theory around what he called "inner necessity" by focusing on the perceptions that come from the "internal Reality" of the Self as opposed to the "external Reality" of the visible world.
Neufeld uses terms like "non-objective illusionism" and "non-objective realism" in discussing his work. Through Kandinsky, he has learned to focus his efforts on those things that can provide a sensual experience, what he calls "visual phenomena" that can be experienced as "Internal" Reality.
Phi (Golden Section) has also played an important role in his art. For him, it provides a fractal methodology that is relative, often self-revealing as well as intuitive in operation. It provides the structure necessary to attain equilibrium with the chaos of improvisation and chance events. His fascination with the cosmos is also important and has led to a curiosity of Reality and what that term means as it pertains to art, Life, and the universe we live in.
To him the most important is the "visual;" what is looked at, what is seen, what is sensed, and the imagination that operates within it; experiencing the perceptions that happen in the pictorial and dynamic space of a painting and the visual sensations that become its abstract content. Even as his sense of curiosity and experimental tendencies widen the scope of his art, he requires accessibility to it as simply a visual, sensual experience. This is what he says connects the artist with the viewer.