Meet the football player turned artist who has been mastering his craft for nearly 90 years.
Long before Vernon Howell became one of West Virginia’s most renowned artists, he was a preschooler living in Barboursville, West Virginia, who loved to draw. But by the time he was 8 years old, an unfortunate incident in school caused him to give up his love of art.
“I had a third grade teacher who had turned me off to art,” recalls Howell. “I did a really good drawing and she thought it should be colored, so she had me paint it with watercolors and ruin it. I stopped taking art classes in school after that and focused on sports. I ultimately went to college on a football scholarship. I decided that was my direction.”
Howell spent a year at Syracuse College in New York on that scholarship, but the art bug was still gnawing at him. He returned to Huntington and enrolled at what was then Marshall College, where he was captain of the football team in 1958 and earned his A.B. and teaching certificate in 1959. He continued his education at Marshall and received a master’s degree in 1964 before doing post-graduate work at the prestigious National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Nearly nine decades later, he’s still exploring and producing art. Today, the Barboursville resident is renowned for his intricate multidimensional, collage-like works of art. His work is part of the permanent collection at the West Virginia Culture Center in Charleston and can be seen at almost every art show in the region, where it usually garners awards.
His first job after college was coaching football at Webster Springs High School, but he eventually returned to the Huntington area where he chose to focus on his art while teaching in the same public schools he was a part of growing up.
“I had opportunities to go on and teach college, but I liked my situation,” Howell says. “I could still coach and have a lot of freedom.”
Thirty years and hundreds of students later, Howell retired to pursue his art full time.
Today, at age 89, Howell is still hard at work. He is married, and he and his wife Beverly have four adult children. His home studio is like a trek through time and dozens of art styles.
Watercolors, oils, woodcuts, even sculptures attest to his broad experimentation over almost 90 years. But the works most people identify with Vernon Howell are his multimedia, multidimensional collages.
“With each example, Vernon transcends the notion of depicting a subject in a conventional way,” assert the directors of the Dickerson Gallery at Tamarack in a 2014 blog post. “Rather, he starts with a morsel of an idea and builds upon it … focus[ing] heavily upon constructing layers and depth in his work, creating an immersive, three-dimensional quality in his pieces that makes them even more mesmeric.”
According to Howell, this style began with an art course at Syracuse.
“It was during the period when the Bauhaus style was popular and pop art was starting,” he explains. “I was introduced to using all those materials; and when I started teaching, you didn’t have much money for supplies, so a lot of my projects were made from scrap materials. Then I started experimenting more, finding problems to solve in my art.”
Over the years, Howell has garnered countless awards for his work, the first coming in 1963 in an Allied Artists Exhibit at the old Sunrise Museum in Charleston. In 2012 he received the Governor’s Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts from West Virginia Governor Earl Ray Tomblin.
According to Randall Reid-Smith, the commissioner of the West Virginia Division of Culture and History who has known Howell his entire life, the football player turned artist is a West Virginia treasure.
“He does our juried exhibition every two years, and it doesn’t matter who the jurors are who come and look at it — they think that his work is so innovative that he has to be like 20 years old,” notes Smith. “I just love that. He is one of our greatest gifts.”
Howell’s work is regularly displayed in shows at Tamarack, the Huntington Museum of Art and the Culture Center. The next time Vernon Howell is featured in an exhibit near you, run, don’t walk, to see his amazing work.
