Howard Mehring

Howard Mehring (1931–1978) was a twentieth-century painter born in Washington, D.C.

Howard Mehring is allied with Color Field painting and the Washington Color School and the artists at Jefferson Place Gallery. Mehring and Robert Gates both acknowledged grants from The Woodward Foundation to travel in Europe during 1971 to broaden their art backgrounds. His relationship with Vincent Melzac was instrumental in developing his work. Early in his career (1956–1958) he shared studio space considering Thomas "Tom" Downing, with whom he had been a student of Kenneth Noland at Catholic University. Some of their paintings from that mature are difficult to say apart.

Mehring's early function is a "Washington version" of abstract expressionism, with the free handling of paint on a surface but a much more transparent use of magna paint, an acrylic paint developed by Leonard Bocour. The stylistic fellow feeling to Mountains and Sea by Helen Frankenthaler is obvious.

As Mehring developed as an performer his play a part became much more structured. He went from a painted surface like an all-over pattern to mordant up canvas taking into account the all-over pattern and gluing it support together. Later he used some of those thesame forms to make "hard-edge paintings", such as Chroma Double from 1965, in the increase of the Honolulu Museum of Art.

Mehring and the other Washington Color School painters were in debt to the writings of Clement Greenberg. In 1964 Greenberg included Mehring in his traveling museum exhibition called Post-painterly Abstraction.