Hi! My name is Justin Howcroft, and I make art.

I create abstract paintings of faces and people using strong colors, simple shapes and lines, and a doodle-y aesthetic. My style gives me a lot of creative freedom to play around with color and composition, which I particularly enjoy.

I think of my paintings sort of like a Rorschach inkblot test. I play with flow, movement, and energy in a way that encourages each viewer to see something different. My paintings convey some things universally, and provide the building blocks for you to put the rest together however you wish. I love hearing what people see in my work and how they connect with it. When someone tells me they built a whole story from little pieces of a painting, saw a specific face in it, or found something completely random, it never fails to put a smile on my face.

To me, that’s the art. Connecting with a piece, seeing what you see, and maybe comparing notes with someone else knowing they’ll see something completely different than you or me. It’s just fun. It’s fascinating to see how unique and special all of our brains are, and my work is an attempt to explore that. I view art as an interaction rather than an object that has to be decoded correctly.

I actually started my art-making life shooting film and printing in the darkroom in high school. I fell in love with the entire analog process: using old cameras, working in the darkroom, mixing chemistry, and not knowing how your shots turned out until you went back and developed them. My niche was interrupting the chemical processes required for film to develop or print properly, creating a controlled chaos of color and turning the destruction of the image into abstraction.

But even back in high school, I would always find myself doodling and playing around with weird abstract forms in my downtime. 

My paintings, especially this earlier work, can be really meditative and relaxing to work on, so I would paint all the time without really taking it too seriously or showing anybody my work. I was taking my photography seriously; the painting was simply a way to relax at the end of the day, something to do just to have something to do.

It was years later, while going through a bunch of my old work, that I realized I had developed a unique style with my paintings and drawings. I figured I should actually show them to some of my friends. When they told me all the different things they saw, and the different emotions they read in the same piece, I got so excited! I realized that I could convey something more intangible and enigmatic through painting, and that this ambiguity could engage people with the work in a way I found particularly interesting. 

From there, I continued to develop the style, cleaned up the work a bit, and became much more intentional in my decision-making process. But I never lost the part that made me want to make these paintings in the first place: the freedom to play, experiment, and see what other people find in them.