File:Coast watch (1979) (20666645641).jpg

Title: Coast watch
Identifier: coastwatch00uncs_11 (find matches)
Year: 1979 (1970s)
Authors: UNC Sea Grant College Program
Subjects: Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology
Publisher: (Raleigh, N. C. : UNC Sea Grant College Program)
Contributing Library: State Library of North Carolina
Digitizing Sponsor: North Carolina Digital Heritage Center

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In an interview before his death, Howell defined it this way: "What makes art art? ... It is not simply copying what you see. That is reporting. You've got to know about why you paint. If you paint a man mending a net, you had better know how to mend a net." Howell's importance as a regional artist is also introduced. The artist is a historian, commenting on the sociology as well as the economics of the time as he lives it, or perhaps even as he remembers it from his youth. Glielmi uses terminology these young students can relate to. "Claude Howell's pictures were like a Kodak moment," she says. "He was capturing in his pictures bits and pieces of the life of the commercial fisherman, of the history of the fishing industry, because he was concerned that maybe 10,50 years from now there may not be as much commercial fishing the way he grew up knowing about it on the coast of North Carolina. He was giving us little historical glimpses of what the coast was all about." Though his fame goes far beyond the boundaries of this state, Howell was first and foremost a product of the coastal environment. However, he was not fond of being termed a regional artist. "I'm very much influenced by my surroundings because it's what I know and what I like. I paint the recognizable, but mainly the abstracted. I try to get the essence of the place rather than the way it looks," he said. And he added, "But yes, I paint a regional picture." The artist was the only child of Claude Flynn and Jessie Campbell Howell. He was born on March 17, 1915, in the Carolina Apartments in Wilmington, one floor above the apartment that would become his home for most of his life. He cherished the view from his window overlooking the downtown area and preferred that location to any other in town. As a young boy, hunting and fishing expeditions with his father became occasions to study wildflowers and birds and nature. His father was soon convinced that his son's first love was art. Both of his parents did every- thing possible to encourage this passion. When he was 17, his father died of a heart attack. The circumstances of the Great Depression forced his mother to Continued
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COASTWATCH 15

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