James Howell pursues grey with a relentless focus on materiality, density, and depth. His work is entirely devoted to the exploration of meticulously formulated pigments, applied in successive layers, polished and reworked to produce surfaces of extreme subtlety and density.

In the final decades of his life, Howell produced hundreds of paintings, prints, and drawings grouped under the title Series 10 (1996–2014), exploring both the subtlety and the expansiveness of neutral grey, as well as its relationship to light and spatial perception. Far from a mere absence of color, grey for him was a living material, threaded with micro-variations that reveal themselves differently depending on the angle of light and the viewer’s distance. Howell rejected the notion of his works as monochromes: each piece emerges from a patient process in which the combination of multiple pigments generates a field of unstable energies, oscillating between opacity and transparency. As he himself noted: “I remember having these thoughts one day looking at snow and fog. The views were simplified and the details were erased. Yet I experienced all the richness.” By declaring that he “paints a Sugimoto with fog,” Howell places his meticulous, almost scientific precision at the service of perception. His grey, elusive and indefinable, thus becomes a threshold: neither black nor white, neither ground nor form, but an autonomous perceptual space, an “interweaving,” in the sense envisioned by Merleau-Ponty.