ABIGAIL BOWEN
SOLO SHOW OF NEW PAINTINGS
Lane House Arts Gallery, Bath
29th September - 30th November 2017
New paintings added November 2017
Show extended to the New Year 2018
I want to paint what I feel, not what I see. I used to paint figuratively, then following a spate of mental illness in my family, including dementia, Alzheimers and depression, I started to explore a more metaphysical approach and attempt to capture less rigid, more fluid states of mind. I found a more abstract approach allowed me to create emotionally informed paintings that allowed me to express my feelings about love and loss. A year on, my work is less about memory but continues to try and visualise those emotional states that touch our heart and soul.
New gallery artist, Abigail Bowen is mainly an abstract artist, working on a large scale. She creates fully autonomous paintings that evoke an emotional response in the viewer. She will often start with a word, feeling or passage of text and try to visualise her emotional responses in colour, form and scale. Although some areas of the canvas may resemble water, clouds or sky, she works to remove all reference to reality and hopes that a viewer can respond to the paintings as unique objects in their own right.
Currently, she is exploring the work of and is particularly influenced by Rothko, Francis Bacon, Diebenkorn, de Kooning, Kline and Monet’s Waterlillies. Her work is concerned with memory and loss as she attempts to capture the emotion "edge of the rainbow", where reality and imagination mingle. Conjuring up ghostly shapes that float in and out of our consciousness, she creates each piece by adding layer upon layer of volatile emotionally-charged paint Often the canvas is flipped and turned creating amorphous, ethereal shapes that are without boundary and appear to hum, float and breathe in the changing light.
Working without sketches, Abigail paints directly onto the canvas hoping to capture undiluted, the essence of the emotion. This means that every painting contains the ideas, frustrations, happiness and history of the process that created it. For this reason, she has chosen not to produce prints of her paintings, preferring that each piece remains a unique, autonomous object in its own right.
Abigail was born in Brighton and graduated in Fine Art (Painting) from Chelsea College of Art in 1996. Now based back in Brighton, she is represented in London by the Hicks Gallery, Dar-le and the Bear in Woodstock and shows regularly in galleries and various group shows in Brighton and Sussex. This solo show is her first exhibition with Lane House Arts.
Read more about the artist here
Also showing : new ceramics by Abigail North and Cheryl Cork
New gallery artist, Abigail Bowen is mainly an abstract artist, working on a large scale. She creates fully autonomous paintings that evoke an emotional response in the viewer. She will often start with a word, feeling or passage of text and try to visualise her emotional responses in colour, form and scale. Although some areas of the canvas may resemble water, clouds or sky, she works to remove all reference to reality and hopes that a viewer can respond to the paintings as unique objects in their own right.
Currently, she is exploring the work of and is particularly influenced by Rothko, Francis Bacon, Diebenkorn, de Kooning, Kline and Monet’s Waterlillies. Her work is concerned with memory and loss as she attempts to capture the emotion "edge of the rainbow", where reality and imagination mingle. Conjuring up ghostly shapes that float in and out of our consciousness, she creates each piece by adding layer upon layer of volatile emotionally-charged paint Often the canvas is flipped and turned creating amorphous, ethereal shapes that are without boundary and appear to hum, float and breathe in the changing light.
Working without sketches, Abigail paints directly onto the canvas hoping to capture undiluted, the essence of the emotion. This means that every painting contains the ideas, frustrations, happiness and history of the process that created it. For this reason, she has chosen not to produce prints of her paintings, preferring that each piece remains a unique, autonomous object in its own right.
Abigail was born in Brighton and graduated in Fine Art (Painting) from Chelsea College of Art in 1996. Now based back in Brighton, she is represented in London by the Hicks Gallery, Dar-le and the Bear in Woodstock and shows regularly in galleries and various group shows in Brighton and Sussex. This solo show is her first exhibition with Lane House Arts.
Read more about the artist here
Also showing : new ceramics by Abigail North and Cheryl Cork
