“All things bright and beautiful” The Times 31 May 2019

“All things bright and beautiful” The Times 31 May 2019
A review of a retrospective of the work of Frank Bowling at Tate Britain.

“Frank Bowling is a Guyana-born British artist. His paintings relate to abstract expressionism, color field painting and lyrical abstraction” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Bowling Accessed 31/05/2019

I have previously indicated that I am unfamiliar with styles and practitioners of abstract art and so read this article to further my knowledge. I noted that Bowling is described in his Wikipedia entry as practicing “color field painting”. Researching this a little I read that “The term colour field painting is applied to the work of abstract painters working in the 1950s and 1960s characterised by large areas of a more or less flat single colour” https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/colour-field-painting Accessed 31/05/2019

An example of this is this work by Martin Rothko

Retrospectively I think it was this style of having bold blocks of colour which I was trying to emulate in this landscape image from a few years ago.

The Times article describes a painting by Bowling, Moby Dick.

“Moby Dick, painted in 1981, couldn’t be more like an underwater scene;”

“Bowling also began to enjoy the unexpected effects his paintings had on the viewer. He welcomed the interpretations and responses, though they had nothing to do with his own intentions, which were entirely formal. It is nice to know this because it frees the viewer to allow their imagination run with what could otherwise be rather opaque images.”

This painting is to me reminiscent of encrustations on the rocks underwater, the colours likewise are those of some underwater scenes.

It reminds me of scenes like this:

This made me consider incorporating this influence into my depictions of underwater objects for my “Collections” assignment.