Lanise Howard is a painter born in Southern California in 1993 and a graduate of Otis College of Art and Design, whose figurative, often narrative work carries a surrealistic quality and a spiritual feeling. Three of her original works are currently available at Art of NOMA: two large 2024 oils, The Green Door and The Reminisce, and a 2026 lavender colored-pencil drawing, Study of Elle.
Who Is Lanise Howard and Where Did She Train?
Lanise Howard was born in Southern California in 1993 and was raised partially in New York State. She graduated from Otis College of Art and Design, and she works mainly in paint and mixed media. Those are the facts the gallery publishes on her Lanise Howard artist page, and they are a useful place to start, because they describe a painter trained in a studio tradition rather than one who arrived at painting from another field.
Her work is usually figurative and often narrative. In practical terms, that means her paintings are built around people, and those people appear to be somewhere in the middle of a story: arriving, remembering, waiting, deciding. A figurative painting simply shows recognizable figures; a narrative one invites you to ask what happened just before the moment you are looking at, and what might happen next.
The gallery sums up her subject in one line: she paints Black figures in moments of memory, threshold and quiet determination. Across large oils and intimate works on paper, it adds, she moves between concealment and revelation, femininity and aspiration, building a luminous, deliberate presence on the canvas. That is the frame for everything that follows.
Why Does Her Figurative Work Feel Surreal?
The gallery's biography says there is a surrealistic quality to her work, as well as a spiritual feeling that is often embodied. The wording matters. It describes a quality, not membership in a movement. Her paintings are not dreamscapes of melting objects or impossible machines; the people in them are recognizable, and the rooms and doorways they occupy are recognizable too.
A surreal quality in figurative painting tends to work more quietly than that. The scene is readable, but something in it, a color held slightly apart from the everyday, a doorway that seems to mean more than a doorway, or a figure whose stillness feels charged, pushes the image past simple description. The viewer senses that the picture is also about an inner state, and that is where the spiritual feeling the gallery mentions comes in.
That places her within a wide current in painting today, in which artists use the language of the real to reach something less literal. For a broader look at how contemporary painters handle the surreal, including several other artists in the gallery, read our guide to the artists redefining contemporary surrealism.
Thresholds and Memory in The Green Door
The gallery's description of The Green Door calls it a painting that turns on the threshold running through her work: the passage from the familiar into the unseen, and the tension between concealment and revelation. The title works as both image and metaphor, an entry point that is emotional and psychological as much as physical.
The painting is oil on canvas, made in 2024, and measures 91.4 by 121.9 centimeters (36 by 48 inches). It is built through slow, layered transitions, with color held in restraint so that the surface has weight without closing off feeling. The gallery notes that its tonal shifts reveal themselves the longer you stay with it. It ships mounted on a professional wooden frame, ready to hang, with a certificate of authenticity.
Its companion oil, The Reminisce, is also from 2024 and is also oil on canvas, at 121.92 by 91.44 centimeters (48 by 36 inches). The gallery describes it as sitting close to the center of her practice. Its title names an act of looking back, though not simple nostalgia: the work holds the awareness that memory reshapes what it recalls, occupying the space where recollection and emotion overlap.
Seen side by side, the two paintings make a natural pair. One is about stepping forward through a door into something unknown; the other is about turning back toward something already lived. Both are large enough to hold a room, and both, in the gallery's words, reward sustained looking rather than a quick glance.
How Do Her Colored Pencil Drawings Differ From the Oils?
Alongside the large canvases, Lanise Howard makes intimate works on paper. Study of Elle, from 2026, is drawn in lavender colored pencil on paper and measures 35.56 by 27.94 centimeters (14 by 11 inches). It is framed in pine painted the same lavender, behind a single acrylic face, so the quiet color of the drawing carries out past the edge of the sheet.
The medium changes how the image is made. The gallery explains that colored pencil builds through accumulation rather than force: pressure and repeated line modulate a single hue into depth, so the figure emerges by degrees. Where an oil painting can lay down a field of color in one pass, a drawing like this is assembled mark by mark, and the patience shows in the result.
The scale changes how it is seen, too. A 48-inch oil speaks across a room; a 14-by-11-inch drawing asks to be read at arm's length. The gallery describes Elle as belonging to the same lineage as the large oils, femininity and aspiration held in a single, contained study, which makes it a natural entry point for a collector who wants her work in a more private space.
Works on paper also ask for a little more care than canvases. If you are considering one, our guide on how to display works on paper and drawings covers placement, light and framing.
The Ideas Beneath the Surface of Her Paintings
Her biography lists a wide range of interests: the esoteric, sacred geometry, ancient belief systems, the current digital world, and her experience as a woman of color in today's climate. It is an unusual combination. Some of those subjects look back thousands of years; one of them looks at the screen in your hand; and the last is personal and immediate.
It is worth being careful with a list like that. The gallery does not map each interest onto a specific painting, and a thoughtful viewer should not force one onto the other. Read them as context, the preoccupations a painter carries into the studio, rather than as a key that unlocks each image. The spiritual feeling the gallery mentions is probably the clearest thread connecting them.
What the works themselves make visible is steadier: figures presented with dignity and deliberation, moments of memory and threshold, and a balance between what is shown and what is held back. The gallery's phrase for the overall effect, a luminous, deliberate presence on the canvas, is a fair summary of what you are likely to feel standing in front of one of her paintings.
What Should Collectors Notice Before Choosing a Work?
Start with scale and space. The two oils are large, around four feet on their long side, and they need a wall where they can be seen from a few steps back. The drawing is small and suits a study, a bedroom or a hallway where it will be passed often and seen up close. Neither is better than the other; they are different ways of living with the same artist.
Then look at orientation. The Green Door is listed at 91.4 by 121.9 centimeters and The Reminisce at 121.92 by 91.44 centimeters, so it is worth confirming how each one hangs on its product page before planning a wall. If you can, ask the gallery for additional images or a sense of the surface in person, because the layered tonal transitions both descriptions emphasize are easier to judge in front of the work than on a screen.
Every work listed here is unique, and each ships with a certificate of authenticity. Prices are published on each work's page. To see Lanise Howard in context, browse the gallery's original paintings or the full list of artists at Art of NOMA.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Lanise Howard?
Lanise Howard is a visual artist born in Southern California in 1993 and raised partially in New York State. Her work is usually figurative and often narrative, with a surrealistic quality and a spiritual feeling.
Where did Lanise Howard study art?
She graduated from Otis College of Art and Design.
What materials does Lanise Howard work in?
She works mainly in paint and mixed media. The works currently available at Art of NOMA include oil paintings on canvas and a colored pencil drawing on paper.
Which Lanise Howard works are available at Art of NOMA?
As of September 25, 2026, three original works are available: The Green Door and The Reminisce, both oil on canvas from 2024, and Study of Elle, a lavender colored pencil drawing on paper from 2026.