Look how the yellow falls in Frank Bowling’s two mammoth paintings titled “Middle Passage,” both produced in 1970. See how in one of them, the color meets the red to make an orange that resembles the sun just before it fades from the sky? The yellow can’t stay in one place. It’s restless, much like the Guyanese artist responsible for its trek. At the bottom of the canvas, the yellow reveals a shape, an outline of Bowling’s home country. Squint and the whole of South America hovers in the distance. Africa, too. The yellow ends its journey by mingling with a green as crisp as grass stains. Together, they make a color that, from some angles, looks black.
“For me, the most important thing about these [“Middle Passage”] paintings is not the imagery,” Bowling wrote to me recently, “nor the title,” which refers to the historical slave route between West Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean. “It is about the way the color spreads and bleeds across the canvas, what it does to the eye, how it arrests you as a viewer.” Yet as resistant as Bowling, 89, is to anchoring “Middle Passage” to its obscured geographies, place plays a significant role in the painter’s development as one of the most influential abstract artists of his generation.
Two recent shows explored Bowling’s complex relationship to land surveying. At the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Frank Bowling: The New York Years, 1966–1975,” on view through Sept. 10, examines the painter’s time in the ambitious metropolis, where he fiercely debated art as a critic and started on his map paintings. “Landscape,” at Hauser & Wirth in West Hollywood, which closed Aug. 5, curated 11 of the artist’s recent works. On those large canvases, Bowling homes in on the textures of topography. He embraces and manipulates the viscosity of paint, lets it drip and blend. Splash and congeal.
Bowling was born in Guyana in 1934, when the country was still subject to Britain’s brutal imperial experiment. Memories of his early childhood revolve around his mother, who ran a clothing store and enlisted her son as her assistant. Before he was a painter, Bowling brushed mosquitoes from her legs as she worked on sewing projects. He helped run errands. He would bike up and down the coast of Guyana, from New Amsterdam to Georgetown, collecting orders for ribbons, saris and lace.
“Looking back, I think a lot of that was to protect me from my father,” Bowling said of his mother’s attentiveness. (She would later pay his tuition for his first term at Royal College of Arts in London.) He was, in his own words, an “uncontrollable little boy,” the kind who liked plans that parents would deem dangerous — swimming in ponds, hunting and fishing. Bowling’s father was a policeman with an authoritarian bent. The young artist, thirsty for freedom, found himself at the mercy of belts and whips.
Leaving Guyana was always a goal for Bowling, in part because he grew up as a colonial subject. A life oriented toward Britain meant that further education required relocating there. Bowling arrived in London in June 1953, during Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. He initially set out to be a writer. “When I first came to England, I didn’t know anything about museums and art,” he said.
But Bowling eventually found his crowd and experienced a creative and intellectual awakening. He visited museums with Keith Critchlow and became enamored by the work of J.M.W. Turner, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach. He started creating self-portraits and then, studies in figures. He drew friends and painted athletes, amassing a frenzied body of work that he used to apply to the Royal College in 1959. There, he created figurative and abstract work influenced by Peter Blake and Leonard Rosoman. Paintings such as “Mirror” (1964), which features a tightly wound staircase and expressionist self-portraits, capture the artist’s evolving sensibilities.
New York made sense as a next step for Bowling, who became increasingly frustrated by London’s art scene and bored with figuration. The painter, in the words of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall, was part of a generation of anticolonial modernists who internalized a “spirit of restless innovation.”
Bowling’s experiments during his decade in New York reflect that jittery energy. He lived in a SoHo loft, back when they were affordable, and hung out with Clement Greenberg, Robert Smithson and Donald Judd. He wrote criticism for Arts Magazine and curated shows of abstract artists, such as his famous “5+1” exhibition. The environment — with its bustling conversations, intellectual sparring, late nights and loving competition — pushed Bowling’s practice.
He began to think more about paint as a material and tried to understand its range. He moved the canvas off the easel and onto the floor, a shift that brought the art making closer to an act of play. Then, Bowling would throw on the paint, allowing it to “spread and bleed over the unprimed surface of the canvas,” he said. “Really getting into the thingness of paint.” “Middle Passages” and the “Map Paintings” are among the works born from this tactile process.
Bowling hasn’t changed his practice much in the decades since. He eventually lost that apartment in SoHo and, between 1975 and 1990, he was unmoored and reliant on friends and family. In 1990, the painter secured a studio space in Brooklyn and spent many years shuffling to and from New York and London. Age has forced him to slow down, and these days, Bowling mostly works out of his London studio. His process, which now includes the help of assistants, still prioritizes the materials — the paint, the buckets of acrylic gels in fluorescent and metallic pigments, the gallons of water, the ammonia and the found objects. “Even though I’m an old man and my body is starting to let me down,” Bowling said, “I feel most alive when I’m in the studio.”
What is your day like? How much do you sleep, and what’s your work schedule?
If you are talking about my physical work schedule, it depends. At my age, I’m at the mercy of my body. I need a lot of sleep. Throughout most of my life I worked in the studio every day of the week, come hell or high water. Now, I only manage three or four days a week.
How many hours of creative work do you think you do in a day?
I used to work every day in two shifts, now I do about three or four hours at a time and then go to the pub for half of a bitter and a single malt, preferably Lagavulin. Then I sleep. But even if I’m not in the studio, I never really stop working. I often dream about the next painting that I am going to make. If I can’t sleep, I “paint on the ceiling” in my mind’s eye, and I’m always extremely keen to get to the studio as soon as physically possible.
When you start a new piece, where do you begin — i.e., what’s the first step?
They all start on the floor of my studio, cotton duck canvas soaked in boiling water and washing-up liquid. I don’t prime the canvases, so the first thing I’m doing is breaking down the carrier surface. Then, I have an idea in mind about palette, so I mix the paint — acrylic paint mixed with water, acrylic gel, ammonia water and sometimes pearlescent powder — and I flood the canvas with this thin color.
How do you know when you’re done?
I get to the point in a work when I decide it’s an allover picture. I spend time looking at the edges and usually use marouflage [an adhesive] to frame it. And then the canvas goes to the stretchers and when it comes back, I look closely at it, maybe make some final touches — often with oil paint — and then a title will come to mind. And that’s it, the work is finished.
What music do you play when you’re making art?
I listen to a variety of music — blues songs and jazz tunes — stuff that’s a synthesis of ideas, influences and places. Recently I’ve been listening to Mozart piano concertos.
How often do you talk to other artists?
All the time. My wife, Rachel Scott, is an artist.
What do you usually wear when you work?
It depends on the season, but I like to wear corduroy trousers and brightly colored T-shirts, my Chelsea boots or Birkenstocks. And I never go out without my hat — it’s from Lock & Co. in St James.
If you have windows, what do they look out on?
My London studio has frosted windows, so you can’t really look out, but my studio in Brooklyn has this wonderful view out across the East River to the Brooklyn Bridge and Lower Manhattan. It’s amazing; it’s as though you could step out of the window into the river. I’ve always lived near rivers, whether it’s the Thames or the East River or Berbice River or the Essequibo. Water is a massive influence on my artwork.
What do you bulk buy with the most frequency?
Paint. Gel. Large rolls of cotton duck canvas.
What’s your favorite artwork (by someone else)?
Titian’s “The Death of Actaeon” (1559) and “The Snail” (1953) by [Henri] Matisse.
Do you exercise?
I used to be an athlete. I was a sprinter, winning at 100 yards and the 440-yard dash. Now exercise consists of working with my physiotherapist and going to the studio.
What’s your worst habit?
Booze and cigarettes.
