Katherine Bowling

Last updated
Katherine Bowling
Born
Katherine Bowling

1955
Nationality American
Education Virginia Commonwealth University
Known for Painting
Awards National Endowment for the Arts Grant; New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship; Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation Fellowship
Website http://katherinebowling.com/

Katherine Bowling (born 1955, Washington, D.C.) is a painter known for her layered landscape paintings that draw inspiration from nature in the Hudson Valley.

Contents

Early life and education

Katherine Bowling grew up in Tidewater, Virginia. [1] She received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978. [2]

Painting

Bowling's first New York show, as well as her first solo exhibition, was in 1987. [3] :6

Bowling's works tend to be landscape paintings that often feature woods and fields as well as roads.

Many of her paintings are based on her photographs of woods and fields surrounding and in Scholarie County, where she rents a house. As Molly O'Neill notes in an essay on Bowling and her work, this area is "fifty miles northwest of the vistas that inspired the Hudson River School painters in the mid-1800s." [3] :4

Bowling focused in particular on the imagery of roads for the theme of her exhibition at Greenberg Van Doren, Divide. As the title implies, writes Lilly Wei in the exhibition's accompanying catalog, Bowling views the roads as "abstract marks in the landscape that divide and order space." [1] Even with roads she has often traveled, Bowling finds something new on closer inspection that alters her perception of the familiar and mundane. Bowling explains that the roads "function as a metaphor for memory and displacement." [1]

In 2001, Bowling exhibited a number of seascape paintings. In her essay on the exhibition, art historian and critic Nancy Princenthal writes that, far from being an aberration from Bowling's typically home-based scenes, the ocean paintings are "a return to childhood memories and life long inclinations. A native of Virginia, she spent her first summers at the Atlantic shore and on the Chesapeake Bay." [2]

Primarily, however, Bowling's works focus on capturing the play of light and shadow. Art critic Eleanor Heartney notes that "Her paintings, like those of Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, focus on the ephemeral moment and the fleeting impression, conjuring the flicker of sunlight through the trees, the shifting shadows of early evening, the reflections of clouds and foliage glancing across the rippling surface of a lake." [4]

O'Neill argues that Bowling additionally "has an innate sense of abstraction and she ranges happy as an uncaged chicken, pecking elements from the Impressionists' obsession with light; from modern photography; and the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock." [3] :6

Bowling is influenced by the use of light in the paintings of European Romantics such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable as well as by the later work of George Inness. [3] :6 Her paintings also recall landscapes by Claude Lorraine, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Camille Corot. [1]

Process

Bowling is known for her use of spackle. She uses a long process of layering and sanding to create the "back-lit" effect found in her paintings.

First, the paintings begin as photographs which she typically takes near her rented house in the Hudson Valley. [4] Then, she uses these photographs, which serve as her "preliminary drawings," [3] :6 to aid in the painting process. She also paints from memory and direct observation. [3] :6

Bowling paints on square panels of plywood. Bowling considers rectangular pieces to be too horizontal and rife of implications already of landscapes and horizons. [4] She sometimes paints on one of these square and sometimes paints on several square panels together. The seams between these adjoined panels are left visible. [4]

Next, Bowling applies layers of spackle. O'Neill remarks that "Inspired, perhaps, by her day job of painting houses, [Bowling] turned to more industrial media: damp vinyl spackle, a building compound that is applied to wooden panels to create a matte, fresco-like surface. Thinned oil pigments are poured, allowed to dry, and then the Sisyphean task of sanding begins." [3] :6 Initial layers generally correspond with the color of the light—varying from pinks, golds, blues, and oranges. Through this layering and sanding, she creates a luminous quality in her landscapes.

Despite rigorous sanding, air bubbles within the spackle layers are revealed occasionally on the surface. [4] Rather than disguise them, Bowling integrates them. Heartney writes that Bowling "allows these irregularities to become part of the painting so that the viewer's perception of the play of light and shadow across the image cannot be separated from an awareness of surface itself." [4]

In later stages of painting, Bowling stands above panels to throw, dribble, and splatter paint with a hair dryer, recalling the techniques of Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. [3] :8

Awards and honors

Notable public collections

Solo exhibitions

2010

2009

2007

2006

2005

2004

2001

1998

1996

1994

1992

1990

1989

1988

1987

Publications

Related Research Articles

Justine Kurland is an American fine art photographer, based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jane Hammond</span> American painter

Jane R. Hammond is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. She was influenced by the late composer John Cage. She collaborated with the poet John Ashbery, making 62 paintings based on titles suggested by Ashbery; she also collaborated with the poet Raphael Rubinstein.

Augusto Arbizo is a visual artist, gallerist, art advisor, and art curator. Arbizo lives and works in New York City. Arbizo studied at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated from The Cooper Union School of Art, NY, where he received a Bachelor of Arts in painting; he earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree from the University of Michigan. His solo exhibitions include White Columns, NY; Envoy, NY; Sandra Gering Gallery, NY; Michael Steinberg Fine Art, NY; and Roebling Hall Gallery, NY. Group exhibitions include Artists Space, NY and The Queens Museum of Art, NY. As a curator, he has organized exhibitions for Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, NY, White Columns, NY, and John Connelly Presents, NY among others. He was the director of 11R Eleven Rivington, NY (2007–2017), which merged with Van Doren Waxter; Arbizo was a gallery partner at Van Doren Waxter (2017–2021). Arbizo joined the New York art advisory firm Schwartzman& in 2021.

Elizabeth Magill is an Irish painter. She studied at the Belfast College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, and now lives and works in London.

Lawrence Gipe, is an American painter, independent curator, and Associate Professor of 2D studies at The University of Arizona, Tucson. He received a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (1984) and an MFA from the Otis/Parsons Institute of Art and Design, Los Angeles (1986). He maintains a studio practice in Los Angeles, splitting his time between California and Arizona.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dorothea Rockburne</span> Canadian-American painter (born c. 1932)

Dorothea Rockburne DFA is an abstract painter, drawing inspiration primarily from her deep interest in mathematics and astronomy. Her work is geometric and abstract, seemingly simple but very precise to reflect the mathematical concepts she strives to concretize. "I wanted very much to see the equations I was studying, so I started making them in my studio," she has said. "I was visually solving equations." Rockburne's attraction to Mannerism has also influenced her work.

Louise Fishman was an American abstract painter from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For many years she lived and worked in New York City, where she died.

Judy Pfaff is an American artist known mainly for installation art and sculptures, though she also produces paintings and prints. Pfaff has received numerous awards for her work, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2004 and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1983) and the National Endowment for the Arts. Major exhibitions of her work have been held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Denver Art Museum and Saint Louis Art Museum. In 2013 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Video interviews can be found on Art 21, Miles McEnery Gallery, MoMa, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and other sources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joyce Kozloff</span> American artist (born 1942)

Joyce Kozloff is an American artist whose politically engaged work has been based on cartography since the early 1990s.

Mark Innerst is an American painter known for his luminous urban landscapes.

Jeanne Beth Greenberg Rohatyn is the owner of Salon 94, an art gallery with three locations in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David True</span> American painter

David True is an American painter, born in Marietta, Ohio. He received a BFA from Ohio University in 1966 and an MFA from Ohio University in 1967. In 1978, he was included in the New Image Painting exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He currently lives and paints in New York, and teaches at Cooper Union.

Moira Dryer (1957–1992) was a Canadian artist known for her abstract paintings on wood panel.

Julia Kunin is an American sculpture and video artist. She was born in Vermont, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is inspired by organic forms, undersea creatures, and interior spaces, with a focus on the female body. She graduated from Rutgers University (M.F.A.) in 1993 and Wellesley College (B.A.) in 1984, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been featured in ARTnews, House and Garden, The Brooklyn Rail, and in Harmony Hammond's book Lesbian Art in America.

Maureen Gallace is an American painter based in New York City. She has exhibited extensively internationally, including solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, La Conservera, Spain, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Dallas Museum of Art. Gallace's work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial.

<i>Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine</i> (Memling) Painting by Hans Memling

The Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine is a c. 1480 oil-on-oak painting by the Early Netherlandish painter Hans Memling, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The panel shows an enthroned Virgin holding the Child. St Catherine of Alexandria and St Barbara are seated alongside. Angels playing instruments flank the throne, while the male figure to left is presumably the person who commissioned it as a devotional donor portrait.

Eva Lundsager is an abstract landscape painter. She received her BA from the University of Maryland and MFA from Hunter College. A 2001 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of Fine Arts, Lundsager has been exhibited in the Jack Tilton, New York at the Greenberg Van Doren, and other galleries. She has also published Ascendosphere, a book of her watercolors.

Nancy Princenthal is an American art historian, writer, and author. She is based in Brooklyn, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elise Siegel</span> American visual artist

Elise Siegel is an American sculptor and installation artist based in New York City. She is known for several bodies of figurative work that use subtle and ambiguous gesture and facial expression to evoke psychic and emotional states. In the 1990s, she first gained recognition for garment-like constructions that blurred boundaries between clothing, skin and body, critiquing the roles fashion and plastic surgery play in the construction of sexual and cultural identity; writer Mira Schor included Siegel among the cohort of artists she dubbed "Generation 2.5" and credited for developing the tropes of feminist art. After shifting to clay as her primary material, Siegel was one of a number of artists in the 2000s whose work spurred a rebirth in figurative ceramics emphasizing emotional expression, social conditions, identity and narrative. Her ceramic work—which ranges from roughly modeled portrait busts to highly charged, theatrical installations—is said to capture fleeting moments of internal struggle, conflict and vulnerability, creating a psychological tension with the viewer.

Jessica Dickinson is an American painter based in Brooklyn, New York. She was born in St. Paul, Minnesota.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 Wei, Lilly (2004). Katherine Bowling: Divide. New York: Greenberg Van Doren Gallery.
  2. 1 2 Princenthal, Nancy (2001). Katherine Bowling: Land to Sea. New York: Joseph Helman Gallery.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 O'Neill, Molly (2010). Katherine Bowling: Moments of Grace. New York: DC Moore Gallery.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Heartney, Eleanor (2001). Katherine Bowling. New York: BlumHelman.