Untitled, acrylic and coloured pencil on raw canvas

Howard Fonda is a painter who works in a wide colour palette, building canvases that often seem more like drawings in the way that the pigment is applied and the way negative space is emphasized. The artist’s style is sketched and almost childlike in places, but Fonda’s expert eye for balanced composition lends the works an undeniable sense of intention. 

Untitled, acrylic and coloured pencil on raw canvas

Many of the artist’s works incorporate text elements, or use strategic compositions to suggest different images depending on whether the viewer is up close, or far away. The artist’s most recent works are built up from elongated marks in varying thicknesses, with an entire rainbow of hues spread evenly across the canvas so that some works take on a kind of op-art aesthetic -- up close, the entire canvas appears covered in a random selection of marks, and it’s only once the viewer steps back that the various marks knit together and a single cohesive forms resolves itself. 

In more recent paintings, moments of raw canvas or white space shine through the cacophony of marks, but in older works the colour is dense, multi-layered, and quite impenetrable.

Untitled, oil and coloured pencil on canvas