He shared a classroom with David Hockney—now, Frank Bowling embraces Chinese ink art for his first east Asian solo show

In an email, the artist tells me: “I’m always looking for newness. If there’s a philosophy [to his practice], it has to do with making it new, pushing the possibilities of what paint can do. [I want] to make something with paint that has never been seen before.”

Bowling’s obsession with paint’s fluid texture, exemplified in his poured paintings, can at least partly be explained by his spending his whole life near water. He was born in Bartica, a small town on the banks of Essequibo, the largest river in British Guiana (now frequenting the National Gallery and the Tate, and picked up a pencil to draw for the first time.

In 1959, he enrolled at London’s Royal College of Art. Here, he worked extensively on paintings with figurative elements: self-portraits; paintings of his father; the so-called Beggar series of impoverished people; paintings of swans, and women giving birth; and political works, including a painting of the execution of Patrice Lumumba, the first president of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

His raw talent quickly propelled him to great heights at art school—he earned the prestigious silver medal for painting in the same year as his classmate David Hockney won the gold. But after graduation, Bowling faced a deeply conservative and rigid British art scene that didn’t know how to accommodate a post-colonial, Black creator making sophisticated avant-garde statements. In the 2019 BBC documentary Frank Bowling’s Abstract World, he said: “David Hockney got full-time jobs teaching. Nobody offered me any teaching.”

While Bowling made some connections and presented his work in a number of exhibitions in the early 1960s, he was excluded from key group shows; he wouldn’t be represented by a UK gallery until 2005. He was desperate for artistic independence and creative freedom; encouraged by Carel Weight, then professor of painting at the Royal College of Art, who told him, “If you are going to be an abstract artist, don’t stay here”, he moved to New York in 1966.

“I’ve always refused to be pigeonholed—always,” Bowling says. “In London, when I was starting out, I felt limited by other people’s expectations, their belief that my work was some kind of post-colonial statement, or had something to do with tropical colour or exotic things. It was like a straitjacket. I was yearning for freedom.

“New York was enormously liberating,” he recalls. Bowling immersed himself in the local avant-garde scene, forging friendships with figures like American post-war artist Jasper Johns and engaging in continuous, rigorous dialogue with the formidable art critic Clement Greenberg, whom he met around the time of his 1971 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“Clem [Greenberg] told me that there were no no-go areas for an artist,” he writes. “He made me feel that
I had the right to push my work in any direction I wanted. Since then, I’ve always felt free to be an artist. That’s the only category that has ever really mattered. I would assert that my art is more complex than anything a single label can capture, and that labels have always been more useful to the person applying them than to me.”

Read more: David Hockney: 6 most defining moments of the pop art icon’s career

By the early 1970s, Bowling had abandoned figurative representation entirely to lean fully into pure abstract art, declaring that the genre granted him the greatest sense of personal freedom and pleasure. He started a new body of works known as his “map paintings”. Instead of literal, geographic features, he created expansive, colour-soaked canvases that contain stencilled or silkscreened outlines of continents—frequently South America, Africa and Australia—embedded into fields of vivid, poured colours. As well as serving as a deeply personal exploration of displacement and migration, these paintings frequently centred the southern hemisphere, rejecting the Eurocentric mapping that traditionally dominates western perspectives.

When creating the paintings, he also allowed settled dust, acrylic gels and found objects from river banks to coagulate on the canvas. “I begin with a structure, some geometry, some idea of how the thing might hold. But then the material starts to assert itself: the weight of it, the way it dries, the way it reflects or absorbs light,” he tells me. “You let the material assert itself and find a way to work with it rather than against it.”

There is also evidence in his works of the impact of his mother’s profession as a dressmaker and milliner. Bowling grew up watching her piece patterns and fabrics together at her sewing machine—a foundational memory that later led him to experiment with fabrics and stitched canvases.

Water, too, has long influenced his practice. When he first moved to London, he lived a short walk from the Thames; the Brooklyn loft he moved to in 1990 looked out over the East River. “[Even now,] I live only one street away from the Thames,” he writes. “I travel across it every day on my way to the studio. Every time I cross the bridge, I’m drawn to the way the light is reflected and refracted on the surface of the water.”

This curiosity about the way liquid moves forms the basis of another group of works. For his iconic “poured paintings” of the 1970s, exemplified by pieces such as Crevice Reflecting Morning Light (1977), which is on show at the Hong Kong exhibition, Bowling tilted the canvas to allow liquid acrylic paint to cascade freely across the surface. The technique balanced conscious human control with natural chance, mimicking the rhythmic, elemental motion of a coastal tide.

“My main preoccupation, even in the early figurative work, has always been with what is going on with the paint itself, how the paint moves and, of course, the colour, texture and surface,” he explains. “Seeing it spread and bleed, seeing what comes out on the surface, letting the paint lead—thick and thin, wet-into-wet—[gave me] the confidence to assert that the subject matter of painting is paint itself.”

This fluid methodology has resulted in an astonishing diversity of formats, stretching from tiny canvas squares measuring just 10cm across to monumental, sweeping abstract panoramas spanning up to 13 metres—which apparently still isn’t big enough. “My father recently told The Guardian that he dreamt that he saw this 13-metre painting in a church and could see that if you added a two-metre wing to each side, the painting could fly—so it goes up to about 17 metres wide,” his son says. “And I said, ‘Dad, almost nowhere in the world can you hang this.’ But it tells me something about the depth and strength of his ambition at 92.”

The artist still paints every single day in his South London studio, where he is supported by a team of 15 people. These include studio assistants such as his grandson Frederik Bowling, as well as studio managers, archivists and researchers. Though physical limitations oblige him to use a wheelchair, his mind and creative ambition remain unrestricted. He directs actions, sprays water and observes his assistants closely as they apply vibrant pigments. His studio plays host each day to an inspiring array of visitors—most recently, English fashion designer Sir Paul Smith, who dropped by in July to experience Bowling’s creative process first-hand.

Since the Hong Kong show, plans have been made to expand the artist’s exhibitions from Europe and the US to East Asia. Ben Bowling has been visiting galleries and museums in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and making contact with museum directors and curators based in Taiwan and Japan to identify potential locations. He sees this first Hong Kong showcase as finally completing a circle that his father dreamt of as a serviceman in his 20s but never achieved; and the start of new collaborations.

As for the artist himself, he is just beginning to explore another area of uncharted waters. “Chinese ink artists work with water and the wet-on-wet technique in ways that are remarkably similar to what I’ve been doing for 60-odd years,” he tells me. “I’m genuinely interested to see the connections people make when they see the work in Hong Kong.” While he cannot predict how people will experience his work, he views every new artistic encounter as something of an adventure.

“It’s like a body of water you haven’t yet stepped into: you test it with your foot, you see how it moves. Water is the stuff of paint; it’s the stuff of life; it’s the stuff I’m made of.”

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