Royal College of Art 2023

Art Students League 2020

Lewis and Clark College 2019

Resume

PRESS

NFT

My name is Clay Howard, and I am the artist behind Slippery Dirt. I live between Delhi, Sonoma, and London.

Drawing from my experiences working in the publishing industry for various magazines, as well as my interest in photography and my education in Rhetoric and Media, Slippery Dirt is the culmination of my life experiences and interests.

Working in publishing exposed me to fine art photography and fashion advertising. These two forms play a major role in both the subject matter of my images and the methods I use to build compositions. My pieces are painted collages that stitch together textures, colors, and patterns to create vignettes depicting scenes of modern social class.

My paintings take a satirical approach to group dynamics, non-verbal interactions, and inflated personalities that exist at social gatherings. I portray my view of the world, and my work in the hospitality industry has given me firsthand experience with a variety of exaggerated personalities—caricatures that can only be described as cartoon characters. The reptile in my work symbolizes these caricatures, representing the outer skin that visualizes our inner vanity and narcissistic tendencies. My aim is to challenge viewers by creating aspects of these characters that people can recognize in themselves. I love the idea of self-effacing humor, and I strive to imbue all my art with some degree of relatability.

My latest work shifts toward a more ethereal and meditative plane, exploring texture, pattern, and perspective inspired by the environmental settings of my earlier, animated dinner party series. This series, Infinite Rocks, further refines my visual language by presenting a non-animated environment contained and cloistered within the framework of architecture. These recent works incorporate architecture and repetitive natural materials in a more minimalistic manner, allowing viewers to perceive multiple perspectives within the environments depicted.

I achieved my first goal in my ten-year plan when I moved to New York and started working at the Aperture Foundation. Over the next five years, I hope to sustain myself fully through the work I create for Slippery Dirt. In ten years, I want Slippery Dirt to be a globally recognized name.