In the 1990s, she was Damien Hirst’s first assistant and his best spot painter. Today she juggles a life as a sheep farmer, mother of four and, because she declines interviews, as arguably one of the best British artists most people have not heard of.
Now, Rachel Howard will emerge from the shadows with her first solo exhibition in a UK public gallery, showing over a dozen new paintings at the Jerwood Gallery, in Hastings.
The gallery’s director, Liz Gilmore, said it was part of the Jerwood’s role to showcase British artists, particularly painters “who we feel are important and influential. Rachel Howard meets that brief.”
Her striking, unashamedly emotional abstract paintings have made her a star in the art world, but far less well known outside it.
“This is my year of saying yes to everything,” she says in a rare interview.
Her new willingness to speak is partly down to a perspective-changing car accident her family were involved in last December as they drove to Devon. “It was so life-changing, such an intrusion,” she says. “We live in a world that is so sugar-coated and buffered. All I kept thinking was, this is such a minor trauma in my life … think of people who have had proper traumas.”
Inevitably, Howard gets asked all the time about Hirst, who she met at Goldsmith’s College, in London, as they have played an important part in each other’s early careers. “We were mates and he needed someone to paint spots, and I was waitressing and I didn’t want a proper job – so I ended up working for him to earn enough money to make my own work,” she says. “It was a very good symbiotic relationship.”
Howard was there at the start – “I was the only assistant … there was only me. It wasn’t a factory then” – and is regarded by Hirst as the best painter of his trademark spot paintings.
There are around 1,500 Hirst spot paintings, all signed by the artist, with the larger better ones attracting auction prices in excess of £1m. Yet hardly any were painted by Hirst. The better ones are likely to have been painted by Howard. “The best person who ever painted spots for me was Rachel,” he once said. “She’s brilliant. Absolutely fucking brilliant. The best spot painting you can have by me is one painted by her.”
Hirst is a collector of Howard’s works and they are still close. “He is second to none when it comes to talking about paintings. We’re very combative,” she said, and he popped round the day before to see the new works planned for Hastings.
The exhibition is called At Sea, a reference to the show’s location and where she grew up on a farm by the coast in Easington, County Durham. It is also about the human condition.
“It is about being at sea, being unstable, uncertain. Everything is shifting under our feet. Nothing is stable,” says Howard. “The work is supposed to be – very unfashionably – emotional. I don’t care. All this work is about me really, it is about what goes on in my head and making sense of everything.”
Howard is heavily influenced by what she reads or watches, and there are books all over her airy barn studio in Gloucestershire – everything from Jacques Derrida to Bertrand Russell and The International Handbook of Suicide and Attempted Suicide.
Earlier in her career, Howard used household gloss paint, but now she uses oil paint – although never in a conventional, reverential way. “I paint them and then I unpick the surface,” she says of her work. “I use turps and varnish to unpick the painting. I like to disrupt the self-awareness of applying the paint, turn it on its head and create a surface that isn’t stable.”
Howard and her family moved to the countryside three years with no regrets. “I needed to get out of London. I needed to be away from everything, I needed to work out the painter that I am.”
She now loves the “invisibility” of Gloucestershire, and is adding another string to her bow with sheep – only four at the moment but more on the way. “London was too much. I’m a country girl, really.”
Life is good for Howard and her enthusiasm for her medium is infectious. “Painting is not particularly glamorous but it is very exciting. It is a way of getting from A to B, and making sense of the world. Painting is very exciting. I know people don’t think it is, but it’s incredibly exciting.”
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