This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Born in Chicago, Harold Behrens became an impressionist painter of landscapes. He earned his undergraduate and Masters degrees in Fine Art at the University of Maryland, and then spent seventeen years as a graphic designer for the U.S. government printing office in Washington DC. He has lived there for over sixty years.
In 1976, he began to paint with a palette knife and found that a much more effective way than a brush to depict sunlight coming through shadows.
Source: Morris & Whiteside auction catalogue, October 25, 2002
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Born in 1933 in Chicago and growing up in Washington DC acclimated Howard Behrens to historic painted works in the respective museums of each city. After earning his Masters Degree in Painting and Sculpture in 1964 from The University of Maryland, he began a career that has led him to every end of the globe and back, to find and paint scenes of intense beauty.
In a style that likens itself to the Impressionists of the late nineteenth century. A mixture of Monet, Courbet, Corot and Pissarro- with flair all its own. His use of the palette knife has garnered him the recognition world-wide as the modern master of the technique. An avid world traveler, his magnificent on- location paintings of Mexico, Italy, France, Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and United State's coastlines show his marvelous grasp of the colors of his surroundings. Using impasto (thick paint) he creates depth of field and intense contrast between light and shadow. He has, much like past masters, virtually eliminated black and white from his palette. Believing instead that the colors in nature are more interesting. The way a shadow at noon creeps across a villa in Tuscany, or a dusky garden in Giverny emotes pinks, greens, blues that only a master can see, or more accurately paint.
A lyrical musician with paint. Behrens notes, "I want to be the composer. I don't want to be the piano. And I'll tell you: in art, in painting, you have to be both the piano player and the composer. Every time the music is played, I have to be the one playing it." And play it he does. "Mr. Behren's work speaks to the segment in each of us that wants a better, more beautiful world." Says Victor Forbes- Publisher of Fine Arts Magazine. "Howard Behrens is a romantic poet sculpting paint on canvas, and while he has spawned an entire cottage industry of emulators, few, if any capture the emotional breadth of this man in love with love, life and sun" excerpts for this release were taken from...*Howard Behrens: Romance with the Sun", Fine Art Books, a division of Shining Horizons, Inc, 2000
Source:
Collection Privee Fine Art
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Howard Behrens was born in 1933 in Chicago and grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. He began drawing with crayons when the world around him was colored by the darkness of the Great Depression and he never stopped. For nearly seven decades his life has been defined by light, color, line, and texture. From crayons to sketch pads to experimenting with paint, the world of visual art has been this artist's foremost driving passion.
Classically trained, Howard Behrens hasn't picked up a paintbrush since 1976, when he made an experimental leap to an entirely different artistic technique. By the mid-seventies, Behrens was in his forties, well established as an illustrator and graphic designer, yet he continued to use weekends and nights to paint, experimenting with color, technique, and style. "When I had free time I used to go to the art museums and copy paintings to figure out what the artist had done," Behrens recalls. "I wanted to know the relationship between texture, line, shape, and light and I just kept painting. But one fact always puzzled me. The color of the paint on the palette was so much brighter, more exciting than the paint on the canvas. In 1976 when I had just returned from a three week trip to the western United States, I decided to try applying the colors directly onto the painting with my palette knife -- the hand held metal tool usually used to mix and blend paints. It was easier for me to be freer with the subject matter of the western landscape. Wide open spaces. Wandering riverbeds. Brilliant cloud formations. The western landscape lent itself to being more spontaneous -- and using the palette knife instead of the brush allowed me to work with the paint much more quickly while retaining the pure, vivid color of the paints. I was hooked. I've been applying the colors directly onto my paintings with a palette knife ever since."
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