Ben Howes

Ben Howes is an artist living and working in Hertfordshire. He graduated from Falmouth University with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art. His current practice is centred primarily on painting, while also extending into printmaking and sculpture.

Howes’ work operates as a quiet ritual, using colour, geometry, and symmetry to create conditions for transcendence. Each piece begins with structure, not as an end point, but as a threshold. Circles, grids, and axes form stabilising frameworks drawn from older systems of order, allowing stillness and balance to emerge. Colour functions as frequency rather than ornament, carrying atmosphere and emotional weight, while symmetry is treated as alignment rather than perfection. Runes, symbols, and fragments of abstracted language appear throughout the work as partially sealed signs.

Referencing forgotten alphabets and esoteric scripts, these marks are not meant to be read fluently, but encountered intuitively. Underlying the practice is a sustained interest in the spiritual void that emerges when traditional religious belief recedes, and the structures, rituals, and symbols people adopt to fill that absence. Rather than illustrating doctrine, Howes’ work gestures toward the occult and the divine, offering contemplative spaces where the material and immaterial briefly align.