As Good As Gold

After a successful career in advertising in Manhattan, John Howard’s painting career started as a marketing venture. “I figured what helps sell a painting is to make it look like a painting that should be sold,” says John from his home in Vero Beach. The house is like a mini-gallery, not just of his own work but that of friends and fellow artists like Charles Ray and Bob Baxter. All his favorite paintings have their own styles and their own stories. But as the property of this entrepreneurial eye-catcher, they all have one thing in common: their exquisite, hand-carved, gold-leaf frames. 

Those same frames launched a career that started in the late 1980s in East Hampton and Greenwich and continues today in Vero Beach, where John is featured at the Admiralty Gallery and is known for his oils of what he likes to call “where land meets water.”