Cathy's Art Diary

Beautiful exhibition at Hauser & Wirth pairing two pictures by Frank Bowling to mark his 90th birthday. The two works came from 1973 and now and were of a similar large scale and colour palette but demonstrated how his technique had changed. Both showed a love of the fluidity of paint. The new work “Thanks to Water” had a feeling of a pink Monet lilies painting and made me feel calm yet energised. I’ve been fascinated since to read about the technique used from soaking the canvas in water and paint then applying pink and gold paint with a mop like a performance work. This was a new way of working for him which is remarkable at 90. Closed 16 March 2024

Interesting exhibition at Hauser and Worth looking at the 60-year career of Frank Bowling. The show is in both their London and New York galleries. but needless to say I only saw the London one. The shows look at how his art has been influenced by living and working in the two cities. I enjoyed the good retrospective of Bowling’s work two years ago so it was lovely to see more of his abstract works. I love the way he sticks objects onto the surface of the pictures to give texture and builds up paint to give an almost sculptural feel. Closes 31 July 2021  

Colourful exhibition at Tate Britain of work by Frank Bowling from throughout his career. There was a wonderful variety of work in this show and yet it all held together and did feel like the work of one artist. I was impressed that he’s still painting at 85 albeit sitting down. I was surprised that I’d not come across his before as he’d been at college with Hockney, Derek Boshier and R.B. Kitaj. I liked the room of paintings based on photographs which were bright but slightly distorted images. They reminded me of Sickert works which used a similar idea. There were interesting works which included a silkscreen print of his childhood home in Guyana often cut out and sewn onto the main work. A lot of the works seemed to be about the method and action of painting rather than the final work from fields of colour overlaid by stencilled maps, through works created by pouring paint down a canvas, the addition of turpentine and ammonia to acrylic paint to give different texture...

Small exhibition of recent works by this Royal Academician at the Royal Academy . OK I have to admit I didn’t really get them! They just looked like paint had been thrown at paper! I found they were rather dwarfed by the grand Tennant Room. I did however like 3 portraits he had drawn in the 1960s. Maybe I should have done this before the Watteau!