Reanna’s Gaze 2020

Lanise Howard painted "Reanna's Gaze," and in it, you can see that she really relishes in how paint can make a person come alive! Look at the figure, the soft peach ground, the birds hovering by. The artist is thinking hard about something, and that something might be how to render a person, how to take care and time to really see. And the pixelated square of many shades above the sitter’s head! It’s a painterly move—a symbol of every shade that makes up a person. You feel the paint here, as you do in the rendering of the denim of the sitter’s pants. I bet Lanise Howard looked at a lot of painters when she made this, and I can see an ongoing conversation between artists, inspiring one another’s creativity. It's an embodied expression, where ambiguity and uncertainty make for multiple readings.