Quixotic Pugh credits unconscious as "artesian well" of creativity

Howard reflecting on a profound question proffered by a youth.

Born in the American heartland, Howard quickly grew restless and, like so many of his generation with a vision of the future, went West at the age of five.

Howard came to California with two brothers, his older brother Jeff, and his twin brother John. And yes, he is Howard's identical twin . . . and no, contrary to the rumors, he is not a "parasitic twin" (biologically).

Howard attended school (K-12) in Concord California, and college at Los Medanos community college, U.C. Berkeley and San Jose State where he majored in music composition and minored in philosophy.

Howard's foray into photography undertook a decades-long gestation period; doing many of the creative disciplines except visual art slowly manifested itself clandestinely as a deep-tissue lie. The emergent photographer finally "crowned" at the begining of 2006, then spilled out into the world like a verdent dinosaur sponge that decompresses explosively as it hits the water.

BTW: which kind of dinosaur did you just visualize? . . . It's a strong personallity predictor.^*

Howard lives in Hayward California with his wife and has a Catalpa tree. In 2006 he was named Time magazine's person of the year.

Artistic Philosophy

Howard's approach to visual art, music, and even writing are the same way: always striving to cultivate a garden of analytical precepts, yet always relying ultimately on a seemingly primal, pre-linguistic intuition — an intuition that wells up from an unknowable, selfless part in all of us — in the actual act of creation. Our ego/identity must be relegated to that of a passive witness during these moments one could only characterize as a free-flowing genesis of discovery. Counter to conventional thinking however, Howard believes inspiration itself is merely a personalized response to this magical gift.

As an artistic guideline, Howard avoids appareling his images with trendy decorative styles or whimsical devices, opting instead for the less adorned, naked portrayal of his subjects, lending them greater authenticity, and ultimately, he feels, a universality. The quest for implicit archetypes or meta-archetypes is at the core of each image's design. Just because the symbolic elements in Howard's photography tend to be biased toward the unintelligible does NOT make it less meaningful. Indeed, it is from that great ocean of the unintelligible — swamping our daily awareness with menacing regularity — that dreams emerge, visions haunt us, and spiritual hallucinations eat away at the margins. Here is where the extraterrestrials are telegraphing us frantically, in every asymmetry and syncopation that nature can throw.