Who is Howard Mehring?

Howard Mehring (1931–1978) was a twentieth-century painter born in Washington, D.C.

Howard Mehring is united with Color Field painting and the Washington Color School and the artists at Jefferson Place Gallery. Mehring and Robert Gates both expected grants from The Woodward Foundation to travel in Europe during 1971 to broaden their art backgrounds. His connection with Vincent Melzac was instrumental in developing his work. Early in his career (1956–1958) he shared studio space next Thomas “Tom” Downing, with whom he had been a student of Kenneth Noland at Catholic University. Some of their paintings from that times are difficult to say apart.

Mehring’s early do something is a “Washington version” of abstract expressionism, with the directionless handling of paint upon a surface but a much more transparent use of magna paint, an acrylic paint developed by Leonard Bocour. The stylistic fellow feeling to Mountains and Sea by Helen Frankenthaler is obvious.

As Mehring developed as an player his deed became much more structured. He went from a painted surface later than an all-over pattern to barbed up canvas subsequently the all-over pattern and gluing it assist together. Later he used some of those similar forms to make “hard-edge paintings”, such as Chroma Double from 1965, in the heap of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Mehring and the extra Washington Color School painters were in debt to the writings of Clement Greenberg. In 1964 Greenberg included Mehring in his traveling museum exhibition called Post-painterly Abstraction.