Contemporary abstract artist Frank Bowling

By Venessa Deosaran 

Guyana-born international artist Frank Bowling is famous for his work, which reflects his love for abstract painting and also image fascination with colour, composition and scale.

Bowling, born February 29, 1936 in British Guiana, moved to England in 1950 to complete his high school education. He had ambitions of becoming a writer and poet following his National Service obligations in the Royal Air Force, but he soon turned to art, receiving his art education at different art institutions in England.

In 1959, he won a scholarship to the London Royal College of Art, studying alongside artists such as David Hockney, Derek Boshier and RB Kitaj. Although his contemporaries were more influenced by their everyday surroundings – referencing popular and mainstream culture and becoming the forefront of the ‘Pop Art’ movement – Bowling was more inspired by the British tradition.

His early work, while attending the Royal College of Art at this time, is directly painted from life. It included still-life of fruit and dead birds on tables in his studio or at home in his kitchen. These subjects were painted in a very bold and even a rough style, with a thick layering of paint which Bowling seemed to favour. Bowling also painted the urban environment around him.

On graduating, Bowling was awarded the Silver Medal in Painting and a travelling scholarship to South America and the Caribbean. Many of his paintings are exhibited in the UK, Europe, U.S., and in many important public and private collections worldwide.

Permanent works of art on display in the UK include: the Tate Gallery, V&A Museum, and Lloyds of London in London. There are also permanent collections of his work in New York at the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum. Other collections in the U.S. include the De Menil Foundation in Houston and the New Jersey Museum of Art. He also exhibits at the National Gallery of Jamaica in the West Indies.

Still painting after more than four decades, Bowling has since the mid 1960s travelled and maintained his exhibition career between his New York and London studios. He is still producing paintings, and his recent pieces are often named after friends and his own personal experiences, often made up from cut-up pieces of his earlier paintings. The reason for this is because Bowling feels that his art is the collation and shaping of his memories into a coherent form. His recent canvases still show his trademark experimentation with texture and the emotive potential of colours to communicate “a visual experience of uniquely sensuous immediacy”.

Frank Bowling has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and, on May 26, 2005, elected a member of England’s Royal Academy of Art at Burlington House, Piccadilly London. This makes him the first black British artist elected a Royal Academician in more than two hundred years of the institute’s existence.

For more information on Bowling’s work visit www.frankbowling.com (Taken from Guyana Times Sunday Magazine)