Week 3: Paint and Process: Sally Bowring

Sally Bowring

is a painter who lives and works in Richmond, Virginia. She teaches painting at Virginia Commonwealth University.  Her paintings come  from her intense interest in, and observation of what’s around her: nature, her garden, the city, music, food, poetry, forms of all kinds. In one of her artist statements she references Aretha Franklin as a source of inspiration. Sally’s paintings appeal directly to our senses through their rich textures and color, and by their references to natural forms which emerge and disappear into the many layers of the painted surface. She sometimes uses masks and stencils to form windows, or openings, in the calm painted skins of her panels through which we can glimpse back into the layers and substrates of earlier, more kinetic stages in the painting and the vigorous mark-making that reveals the artist’s hand. Her color is “up-tempo,” optimistic in its ebullience and just pushing at the edge of acidic. Sally Bowring’s paintings are beautiful essays on the interchange between her meditations on the great givens of nature, and the intuitive flow of formal process. They are both image and object.