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Lot Essay
'Colour for me is very personal, even though I set out intentionally, like everything else I do with my work, with a ready-made structure ... I think the very basic drive which keeps me constant, is the fact that I need to push the ideas as found over the edge where it happens for me; that is, on my painted surface. I feel it's reinvigorated and new. So, colour is a sense of a very personal dilemma. I'm adjusting colour almost entirely through emotional leads. Colour plays an enormous part in my work, if not the most important part'.
-Frank Bowling
Born in Guyana in 1936, Frank Bowling moved to Britain at the age of 15, completing his education at the Royal College of Art in 1962, alongside David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier. Initially working as a figurative painter, he moved towards abstraction after settling in New York in the late 1960s where he built a strong reputation and following. He received great support from Clement Greenberg, who visited his studio and became a friend and advocate of his abstract work. Fuelled also by a reckoning to incorporate black artists into the trajectory of Modernism, Bowling was forced to defend himself from stereotyped expectations of others: the St Lucian poet and watercolourist Derek Walcott ‘berated me for betraying the Caribbean spirit; if you weren't painting cane-cutters and suffering, you weren't a Caribbean artist. But everything I felt attached to was London-born’ (F. Bowling, quoted in M. Jaggi, ‘Books: The Weight of Colour’, The Guardian, 24 February 2007).
Bowling worked by pouring paint directly onto canvases, often foregoing an easel in favour of a canvas on the floor. His poured works of the late 1970s allowed some independence and chance as to how his colours mixed together on the canvas, marking a departure from the work of more traditional ‘Colour Field’ painters. Indeed, colour became the driving force and vital through line of Bowling’s paintings, and he has repeatedly explored its formal and material qualities. This can be seen to particularly striking effect in work of the early 1980s, such as Birds 'n Bees 'n Fishes Too. Reflecting recently, the artist observes that ‘colour has its own mathematical clarity and grammar in laying bare and explaining light. It’s not reflected light, as in nature. The light comes out of the work’ (F. Bowling quoted in M. Jaggi, ‘Frank Bowling: the British-Guyanese artist on his 60-year transatlantic career’, The Financial Times, 24 May 2019).
In 1987, the Tate Gallery made a Bowling painting their first acquisition by a living black British artist, and in 2005 Bowling was the first black artist to be elected to the Royal Academy of Arts. The curator Gilane Tawadros has said of Bowling’s style ‘his experiments in paint in the 1960s, and since, were way ahead of their time. He paved the way for other artists for whom political and aesthetic considerations are not seen as separate’ (quoted in op. cit.).
This year has seen the widely-celebrated retrospective of the artist’s work at Tate Britain, which has firmly placed Bowling at the centre of the art scene, displaying his mastery of colour and the staggering possibilities of paint.
The Frank Bowling Family are currently preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work and would like to hear from owners of any work by the artist so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Frank Bowling Family, c/o Christie's, Modern British Art Department, 8 King Street, London, SW1Y 6QT.
-Frank Bowling
Born in Guyana in 1936, Frank Bowling moved to Britain at the age of 15, completing his education at the Royal College of Art in 1962, alongside David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Allen Jones and Derek Boshier. Initially working as a figurative painter, he moved towards abstraction after settling in New York in the late 1960s where he built a strong reputation and following. He received great support from Clement Greenberg, who visited his studio and became a friend and advocate of his abstract work. Fuelled also by a reckoning to incorporate black artists into the trajectory of Modernism, Bowling was forced to defend himself from stereotyped expectations of others: the St Lucian poet and watercolourist Derek Walcott ‘berated me for betraying the Caribbean spirit; if you weren't painting cane-cutters and suffering, you weren't a Caribbean artist. But everything I felt attached to was London-born’ (F. Bowling, quoted in M. Jaggi, ‘Books: The Weight of Colour’, The Guardian, 24 February 2007).
Bowling worked by pouring paint directly onto canvases, often foregoing an easel in favour of a canvas on the floor. His poured works of the late 1970s allowed some independence and chance as to how his colours mixed together on the canvas, marking a departure from the work of more traditional ‘Colour Field’ painters. Indeed, colour became the driving force and vital through line of Bowling’s paintings, and he has repeatedly explored its formal and material qualities. This can be seen to particularly striking effect in work of the early 1980s, such as Birds 'n Bees 'n Fishes Too. Reflecting recently, the artist observes that ‘colour has its own mathematical clarity and grammar in laying bare and explaining light. It’s not reflected light, as in nature. The light comes out of the work’ (F. Bowling quoted in M. Jaggi, ‘Frank Bowling: the British-Guyanese artist on his 60-year transatlantic career’, The Financial Times, 24 May 2019).
In 1987, the Tate Gallery made a Bowling painting their first acquisition by a living black British artist, and in 2005 Bowling was the first black artist to be elected to the Royal Academy of Arts. The curator Gilane Tawadros has said of Bowling’s style ‘his experiments in paint in the 1960s, and since, were way ahead of their time. He paved the way for other artists for whom political and aesthetic considerations are not seen as separate’ (quoted in op. cit.).
This year has seen the widely-celebrated retrospective of the artist’s work at Tate Britain, which has firmly placed Bowling at the centre of the art scene, displaying his mastery of colour and the staggering possibilities of paint.
The Frank Bowling Family are currently preparing the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work and would like to hear from owners of any work by the artist so that these can be included in this comprehensive catalogue. Please write to The Frank Bowling Family, c/o Christie's, Modern British Art Department, 8 King Street, London, SW1Y 6QT.