Painting

Blue Dome Gallery Painting

Cecil Howard

BS in Art Education, MFA Painting and Sculpture, Professor of Art Emeritus Western New Mexico University.

Cecil taught art in Kansas before accepting a position at Western New Mexico University where he first taught ceramics and basic art and was Director of the Francis McCray Gallery. The development of the Fine Arts program led to a later teaching emphasis in sculpture and painting. He retired in 1994 after 31 years in the Department of Expressive Arts, having been chair for several years.

A recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1999, Cecil served on the Capitol Arts Foundation Board of Directors for many years. He has exhibited and received numerous awards in painting, sculpture, and crafts on regional, national, and international levels, and he acted as a juror for several exhibitions in the Southwest.

Private and public collections include his artwork. A large collage is on permanent exhibit in the New Mexico Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe. Several of his pieces were part of successive traveling art exhibitions compiled by the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Initially recognized for his collages and assemblages, Cecil has more recently focused on painting in acrylics, producing colorful canvases. His subjects are sometimes representational, sometimes abstract, or often a combination of the two, for intentional ambiguity. Once, a friend jokingly described his work as that of a “baroque surrealist.” His studio is in Silver City.

Marilyn Howard

BS in Art Education, taught art in Wichita, Kansas before moving to New Mexico.

She and her husband, Cecil, opened two of the first art galleries in the Silver City area before they moved to a farm near Glenwood with their two children. There they established individual studios, while at the same time building a house, cultivating extensive gardens, and caring for numerous animals.

Now primarily a painter and printmaker, Marilyn created quilts, fabric wall hangings, paintings, and original prints. Her early work in three-dimensional fiber sculpture earned her a purchase award from the Albuquerque Museum of Art. Later, the Museum purchased a pastel landscape painting, and the New Mexico Capitol Art Collection in Santa Fe accepted her pastel still life painting for display in the Capitol Building.

Her fabric assemblages received awards in the Southwest and were exhibited and sold nationally. Two notable books on fiber art include her work.

As a printmaker, Marilyn created intaglios, embossings, relief prints, and monotypes, sometimes incorporating fabric and paper collage elements.

In more recent years, she worked primarily in pastels to realize still life subjects which she arranged and carefully lighted in her studio.

Landscape themes have always captured her interest in various mediums. The river valley farm in the Mogollon mountains provides much of her favorite inspiration.

Marilyn now works out of her private studio on the outskirts of Silver City.