Wilshire Center

John Langley Howard made his reputation as a Social Realist with a Depression-era mural in San Francisco’s Coit Tower in 1934. And, while it’s tempting to try to see a certain militant idealism in his more recent perfectionist paintings of nature, that would give the work an unwarranted ecological rather than a transcendental emphasis.

What is immediately clear from this exhibit is that after the rampant politics of the ‘30s Howard let go of social commentary altogether. He began instead to display a robust fascination with landscape and minutely observed nature. In refining his skill he developed a meticulous and poetic style that breathed warm life into the clinical precision of the technical covers he did for Scientific American.

Howard’s nature paintings date back to ‘60s. The images are an amalgam of fine color lines that build to an incredibly precise, almost glowing, metaphysical art. Only occasionally do the images of blooming artichoke and dandelions leave their benign guise as metaphor to pose an open question about heaven and hell--as in the surrealistic “Myth or Fact” fantasy watercolor. Most often they are simply a visual reference to the cycle of life and death. It’s a poignant reference that makes mortality as a living process of change not closure. (Tobey C. Moss Gallery, 7321 Beverly Blvd., to June 30.).