Daryl Howard

Daryl Howard is a Texas-based artist who has devoted over four decades to the practice of traditional Japanese woodblock printing, forging a deeply personal bridge between American artistic sensibility and centuries-old Japanese craft.

After receiving her BFA from Sam Houston State University, Howard moved to Tokyo in the 1970s to teach art at an overseas school. There, a chance encounter with a private collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ukiyo-e woodcuts sparked a transformative connection to the medium. She sought out master printmaker Hodaka Yoshida and undertook an intensive apprenticeship in which she learned the traditional carving and printing processes that would define her artistic career. Upon returning to the United States, she pursued graduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin beginning in 1976, focusing on mixed media collage while continuing to develop her printmaking practice.

Howard's woodblock prints are made using traditional Japanese techniques, with a separate block for each color in the composition. She applies watercolor and rice paste with Japanese brushes, then transfers the image onto dampened handmade mulberry Kizuki paper using a baren. A distinctive finishing touch is the application of gold, silver, or copper leaf as embellishment, lending her prints a luminous, almost sacred quality.

Her subjects center on the natural world and architectural forms, with trees, landscapes, water, and traditional structures recurring throughout her body of work. Her compositions balance Eastern restraint with a warm, tactile expressiveness that reflects her Texas roots.

Howard was named Outstanding Alumni by the Sam Houston State University Department of Art in 2017, and her work has been featured in numerous juried exhibitions. A major solo exhibition, 'The Floating World of Daryl Howard: Woodblock Prints by a Texas Master,' was mounted at the Museum of the Southwest in 2023. She is represented by Ronin Gallery in New York and Flatbed Press and Gallery in Austin, and her prints are held in over seventy-five private and public collections across the United States.