Born in Washington DC, Howard Mehring was a painter associated with Color Field painting and the Washington Color School. Early in his career (1956–1958) he shared studio space with Thomas Downing, with whom he had been a student of Kenneth Noland at Catholic University.
Mehring's early work is a "Washington version" of Abstract Expressionism, with the loose handling of paint on a surface but a much more transparent use of magna paint, a type of acrylic paint.
As Mehring developed as an artist his work became much more structured. He went from a painted surface with an all-over pattern to cutting up canvas with the all-over pattern and gluing it back together. Later he used some of those same forms to make Hard-Edge paintings.
In 1964, writer and critic Clement Greenberg included Mehring in his traveling museum exhibition called Post-Painterly Abstraction.