Brilliance outside the arenas of chess and hard math is difficult to quantify. In the realm of abstract art, masterpieces can appear to resemble little Janey’s latest oak-tag effort taped to the family fridge. “Janey could never do a DaVinci,” mom says, “but she’s pretty good with the abstract stuff.”

The gap between abstract artists and realists, or even expressionists, constitutes a chasm for many. After a century of popularity, abstract art still has the power to send an otherwise intelligent person slinking away from its mention with the same stealthy speed employed to flee particle physics conversations. Then the sotto voce confession: “I just don’t get it.”

As such, the brilliance of Howard Joseph Blumstein emerges over the course of an hour on two distinct planes.

First, there is the art itself: bold and often, but not universally, colorful and abstract to its soul. He sells his paintings – in the $4,500 range – though he does not make his living with his art; he is chief financial officer for London Luxury, a New Rochelle-based importer and wholesaler of linens for the likes of Bed, Bath and Beyond and Costco.

Second, bordering on miracledom for those who equate Kandinsky with little Janey, he speaks of his art in a manner that makes sense. He clearly has thought about de-abstracting his art so that a nonabstract mind can grasp both its subtleties and, at times, its assault on the senses. “Abstraction is a universal language,” he says. “I do feel there are common denominators of the human experience.”

Blumstein is a visual storyteller, a distiller of images, a lover of shapes and colors. A million people might walk beneath a Manhattan billboard without a thought beyond the advertised message. “I saw something different,” he says. And there it is on canvas: the reinterpretation of a billboard into form and color.

Blumstein’s wife is Esther. They have two grown children: daughter Rachel Posner is a clinical psychologist whose husband Jonathan is a psychiatrist; and son Jonah is a singer-songwriter-filmmaker, who performs with wife Mia as Mia & Jonah and he has a second musical outlet via the band Isis Radio. Through the Posners, the Blumsteins have two granddaughters, Hannah, 3 ½, and Talia, 1.

Blumstein is known generally as Howard, though in the art world he is Joseph, which is how he signs his paintings.
Because he often paints in oils, layers must dry before more paint can be applied. The paint dries at its own pace and to hurry the process is to court a puddle of mud on the canvas.

“What you put down first affects the final appearance,” he says. “It gives the painting depth, almost a translucency.” It is a technique he learned by studying how Rembrandt layered his paint. Besides Rembrandt, Blumstein also admires the early abstract master Wassily Kandinsky and the modern architect Frank Gehry, whose international jawdroppers include the theater at Bard College in his trademark metallic cloud style.

Blumstein trained in portraiture before embracing the abstract. Even before formal training, he was a doodler as a youth. “I still do it,” he says of doodling. “But now I have a different eye and I’m looking at it differently.”

In his professional life, Blumstein worked for Westinghouse in Brazil and for Rockwell International in Italy. He claims a facility with languages, picking up Portuguese as an adult and then using it to fake his way through Italian when he and Esther went to Milan with Rockwell. He has been with London Luxury, which employs 30, 10 years.

It takes several weeks, perhaps, to paint a canvas. The process is organic, however, and can take longer.

Blumstein does not know when he begins how a painting will end. He once carted several canvases to Union Square in Manhattan, “Just to get some feedback, see how I was doing, not really to sell them; that wouldn’t really be a place I would sell. I got some interesting comments.” He often interprets the urban landscape, which he calls “such an unbelievable challenge.”

“What’s important to me is communication, to be able to get through,” he says. “We’re all very isolated inside. If I can reach you on an emotional level and touch you, that would make me very happy. Language has its limits. There are other ways of expressing emotions without words.”

Article by

Bill Fallon