While his tools and materials suggest Howard works in clay and bronze, his true medium is light. Light on every body-indifferent light, animating light, sanctifying light. Light gathering in the folds of the uniforms, washing the boot tops and the rifle barrels, radiant, hard as marble, soft as lambswool, painting the floors, drifting into the corners like snow, sleeping in the shadows. Iron light, straw light, light bright as brass, sun-yellow light corkscrewing from the skylights to settle across every unfinished face and figure.
You see it sifting down from the ceiling and sneaking through the glass doors, cascading from the two big windows up front, the long room filled with it in every angle and on every surface, the whole place swelling with daylight pouring through the glass bricks out back. Not as some condition of simple illumination, but as the maker of solids, the hand, the hammer and the chisel, the creator. “Light is everything,” says the sculptor.
