"Teethmarks As Souvenirs" (2022, Houston, Texas) by Howard Sherman

For IN SITU ART CLUB, Houston-based painter Howard Sherman looks back on the making of Teethmarks As Souvenirs, a 2022 canvas where gestural abstraction collides with cartoon figures and hard-edge geometry. He shares the instincts, the art history, and the sense of humor that hold the picture together.

Teethmarks As Souvenirs, 2022 Acrylic, canvas, spray paint and marker on Canvas - 70 x 60 x 2 in

“Before I was a painter, I was a cartoonist. As an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin I drew a daily newspaper comic strip, and after I graduated I placed it to newspapers across the United States. This was right before the internet, when people still read the funnies over breakfast. By the late nineties I had become a decent joke writer, and I reached a fork in the road: keep chasing comedy, or commit to this art thing that didn't run on a daily deadline. I chose painting. Decades later, that cartooning background still runs through everything I make. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it's subtle, but it's always there — and in Teethmarks As Souvenirs you can feel it.

Because I'm on the cover of a book called Texas Abstract (Fresco Books), people tend to file me with the abstract painters. But this work isn't fully abstract, and it isn't openly figurative either. It sits somewhere uncomfortably in the middle, and I'm happy with that. What I'm really after is a marriage of gestural abstraction with cartoony figures. I have a deep affinity for various movements in Modernist art history including Abstract Expressionism, Neo-Expressionism and Color Field painting. So the question I keep asking myself is: how do I take all of that history I love and push it somewhere it hasn't been before?

In Teethmarks As Souvenirs, that means weaving together very different traditions even though on paper, they wouldn't seem to work. There's the loose, aggressive, gestural mark-making. There's a cartoonish figure that slowly reveals itself — a mouth, an arm, a hand, the whimsical black contour lines. And then there are those hard-edge yellow triangles, which come from a completely different lineage: geometric abstraction. My goal is to synthesize these disparate movements until they feel like they belong on the same surface.

I work without a plan. No preliminary sketches, no preparatory drawings. I want to be in the moment and respond to whatever the canvas throws back at me. The yellow triangles, though, are the one constructed element: they aren't painted directly onto the surface — they're separate pieces of canvas that I spray-painted, cut into shapes, and collaged back into the work. That gesture has its own history for me. Right out of graduate school I was spray-painting directly onto my surfaces. A critic lumped me in with graffiti writers, which wasn't what I was doing, and I felt so self-conscious about it that I stopped using spray paint for years. Eventually I found a way to bring it back on my own terms — not as something off the side of a train or a building, but as cut, collaged shapes. It added a new ingredient to the recipe. The spray adds something atmospheric, almost like smoke or old black-and-white photography, without taking anything away.

You can read those sharp yellow triangles as shards, as knives, as blades. But I never want the aggression to have the last word. The work is made in such a physical way that I'm always trying to offset it with something playful — and color is one of my main tools for that. Instead of the cold steel blue or fire-engine red that would simply reinforce the violence of the making, I reach for pastels, a lot of yellow, some pink. Picasso understood that orange and red could carry passion and fury; I think pink and violet and yellow carry their own playful emotions. You don't need a PhD in Art History to feel it. At an exhibition once, little kids would run up wanting to touch my paintings, because they sensed something fun and whimsical in them. I love that. It tells me the humor is landing, even when it's indirect.

I showed this particular canvas at Roasters Gallery in Marfa, Texas. It's an early example of the spray-paint collage, canvas glued onto canvas, and it's still one I love. For me it's the whole tightrope walk in one picture: art history and cartooning, aggression and whimsy, the blade and the joke, all held together.”

Howard Sherman, Houston, Texas, June 18, 2026