Lawrence (Larry) Howard, who died on December 8, 2010 at the age of 79, was intimately connected with AVA Gallery and Art Center (AVA), as an exhibiting artist as well as a faculty member, for almost four decades. He worked actively as an artist until shortly before his death; two of his watercolors were included in AVA’s 2010 Holiday Exhibition, which opened on November 26, 2010.

An exhibition in his memory will be on display in the Stone Carving Studio on the first floor of AVA’s Carter-Kelsey building at 11 Bank Street in Lebanon, NH. (The Stone Carving Studio, which provides great wall space, will be reorganized and adapted to an exhibition space for the occasion.) The exhibit will be open to the public during gallery hours, Tuesday – Saturday, from 11am to 5pm, from Saturday, January 8—the day that a memorial tribute for Howard will take place in AVA’s Clifford B. West Gallery from 2 to 3pm—and will remain on display through Saturday, January 29.

Howard is noted for his New England landscapes and ”house portraits,” rendered in loose brushstrokes and a subdued palette. Lebanon-born and -bred, Howard knew since he was a 4th grader that he wanted to be a landscape painter. “Some would say my life has been spent in search of the perfect painting,” Howard wrote for an exhibition he had at AVA in 2008, adding that he was “still looking for that perfect painting. It would just be nice to do it.”

As a young man, and after three years in the United States Marine Corps—he served in Korea during the Korean War— Howard attended art school in Boston. During the 1970’s, he had a studio and a gallery on Rocky Neck in Gloucester, Massachusetts; he was artist-in-residence at the Ossabaw Island Project on a barrier island near Savannah, Georgia, in 1973 and 1975.

He was a member of Boston’s Copley Society, the New England Watercolor Society, the Rockport Art Association, and the New Hampshire Art Association. For a number of years Howard taught both watercolor and oil painting at AVA; his classes were always filled to capacity, and he delighted his students with his individual approach to instruction as well as with his fascinating demonstrations.