Aliene de Souza Howell

Aliene de Souza Howell is a Brooklyn based artist who was born and raised in Nashville, TN. She is the daughter of a Brazilian Physical Education Specialist and a psychologist of Welsh descent originally from Long Island, New York. Growing up in this bi-cultural, analytic environment imbued Howell with keen observation, curiosity and scrutiny for human behavior.
In her work, animals and object hybrids strip the specificity of human features to bring the focus to gesture and movement, animals and inanimate objects functioning as metaphor for human interactions with each other, the objects we use, and the natural world.
The graphic and monochromatic nature of the linocut lend her surrealistic images an austere, documentary character out of time and place. The slow, deliberate process of carving a linocut and the image that develops is the result of an intense form of physical excavation. The marks left document a somewhat harsh yet whimsical physical process that mirrors the dual nature of the images.
Howell received her B.F.A from Guilford College and her MFA from the New York Academy of Art. In her spare time Howell is a voracious reader of fiction, film lover and outdoorswoman, having once watched a storm pass below her while hiking in the German Alps. She recently completed a post graduate fellowship, was critiqued by Steve Martin, exhibited in New York City and Germany, and is in the collections of Naomi Watts and Leiv Schreiber, Francie Bishop Good and Howard Tullman.