Uncovering the Depths of Frank Bowling’s Radiant Abstractions

Frank’s 21st-century revival culminated in his 2019 retrospective, “Frank Bowling: The Possibilities of Paint are Never-Ending,” at Tate Britain. Now, the pioneering Black British painter remains at the center of exhibitions and accolades dedicated to 20th- and 21st-century abstractionists. In addition to numerous museum acquisitions of his work, Frank was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2020, and in the following year, awarded the 2022 Wolfgang Hahn Prize. This year, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, will present the first major U.S. museum survey of Frank’s oeuvre in more than four decades. “Frank Bowling’s Americas”—on view from October 22, 2022, through April 9, 2023—focuses on the transformative decade of work Frank produced in mid-1960s New York against the backdrop of the Black Arts Movement.

Frank’s methodological process and 70-year career as a working artist began in British landscape painting. Trained in this classical style, Frank reached his limits with representational art early on. Described as a restless spirit by Richards, Frank has constantly resisted fixed categories and labels throughout his practice. “He completed Mirror (1964–66), arguably considered a masterpiece, and then never made another figurative painting again,” recalled the artist’s son Ben.

Perhaps Frank’s waywardness is informed by his own migrational travels and lived experience. Born in Guyana in 1934, Frank moved to London in the ’50s at the age of 19. After studying the artistic styles of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, Frank began to explore Color Field as a way to break open landscape painting. This shift coincided with his move to New York in 1966, where he would remain until 1975, before alternating between there and London from the late 1970s through 2019.

Frank’s growing interest in color […emphasized] that abstraction need not be devoid of lived experience to make an impact.

Pointing towards the rich, large-scale pastel painting Flush (2017), Ben described his father’s process as pooling water and paint together onto a canvas that’s draped over a table: “Wet onto wet.” The paint, water, and metallics sit overnight to dry partially, only for Frank to revive the liquid’s movements by adding more elements on the canvas. With water—its color and fluidity—governing so much of Frank’s process, it may come as no surprise that his astrological sign is a Pisces.

This method renders a deeply layered and surreal color tonality, heightening the dimensionality of the work. But what happens when his paint mixture begins to run off the canvas? “He hates waste and doesn’t want to see a drop of paint or gel on the floor,” Ben said, explaining that his father uses canvas and paper to absorb the excess. With Flush, for example, the main portion was painted on top of a table with the sides of the canvas draping off the edge, allowing the paint and water to run outwards and “paint” the edges of the canvas.

Frank’s extensive collection of works on paper more visibly map the way water can move from his canvases to create a whole new work, a process Ben described as his father’s version of automatic writing. “They are much more fluid,” said Ben, describing the differences in appearance of Frank’s works on paper from his canvases. “You see much more of the flow of the liquid. There are some in the 1980s that look like riverbeds.…When you know the process, you can see the residue of the water on the canvases but it is much more vivid [on paper].”

[His] luminous abstractions are made through a process that can best be described as a baptism. His relationship with paint is alchemical.

While some of the works on paper will be on view in “Frank Bowling’s Americas,” the continual star of Frank’s oeuvre are his impressively scaled canvases. “Paper couldn’t take the beating that the canvas could take,” added Richards, noting that Frank isn’t as concerned with the qualities of paper as printmakers might be, but more interested in the vehicle for getting the work done.

It was during Frank’s first decade in New York when the artist refined his interest in cartography, eventually leading to his series “Map Paintings” (1967–71). In the work Night Journey (1969–70), we see the outlines of Central and South America paired with Africa, submerged in a wash of dark primary colors—red, yellow, and blue. The “Map Paintings” demonstrate Frank’s growing interest in color and abstraction to convey mood, while simultaneously emphasizing that abstraction need not be devoid of lived experience to make an impact. Furthermore, this body of work also conveys the hidden, if not subconscious, links that members of the Black diaspora have with land masses as a result of Europe’s violent collisions with Africa, the Americas, and Caribbean through the transatlantic slave trade.

Ben and Sacha described Frank’s latest work as a return and reflection on past styles he experimented with over the years, which includes the maps. “His late works [are like] a medley at the end of the musical that refers to the songs that appeared earlier in the piece. Sometimes they are disrupted by another voice, or they are all of the sounds coming together,” Ben said. “Now he is back at pouring but in a different way, incorporating found objects, or in panels, and now with more pearlescent work.”

Frank’s commitment to pursuing his own path is exactly what allowed him to produce an expansive oeuvre that is distinct and authentic to himself.

Richards added, “This whole thing has a circularity to it. It’s not Cartesian and there’s a series of pictures from 2008 that almost look like automatic writing…it fools with the notion of the Cartesian left-to-right theory at the same time it [uses the circle]. It turns everything on its head, much like Frank.”

The circularity is no doubt caused by Frank’s active studio use. At the age of 88, he has a steady routine of going into the studio about three times a week and working on more than one painting at a time. When Frank is not in the studio, according to Richards, he is painting the works on “a metaphorical ceiling in the sky,” or in his mind, due to his inability to switch off that creative valve. This artistic hunger exceeds his painting process and includes his deep interest in all things mystical that inevitably find its way into his work as well.

“Frank knows so much.…It’s so subsumed and integrated…but if you were to ask him, he would look at you and [tell you], ‘Get the fuck out of here,’” Richards said laughing. Ben added that Frank’s mother believed that he could see into the future and took him to seances in his youth, where he would follow the practices and rituals of obeah traditions. When Frank was a teenager, he converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Patrick Michael, making his full name Richard Sheridan Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin Bowling. But even after his conversion, the magic was never too far behind. Richard recalled times when he could hear Frank chanting illegible words and hymns from outside of the studio.

Frank’s work, of course, is ripe for magical interpretation, not only through its swirl of colors, but also the repeated motifs of the serpent, cross, and potential Haitian veves (symbols that represent Voodoo deities) that emerge in the backdrop of his paintings, submerged beneath the paint. Because of Frank’s rich use of metallic, pearlescent, and vivid pigment in addition to highly concentrated paint used in advertising like day-glo or automobile paint, his abstractions transform in different lighting conditions, becoming otherworldly under the right circumstances.

Ultimately, his desire to combine things, like spirituality and paint, naturally lends itself towards his staunch resistance against singularity, including its relation to space and race. As Ben put it, “Frank has always been strongly against claims to purity. He always rejected it. In every sphere, [he’s] always interested in hybridity, mixing, [and] mestizaje.”

Described as a restless spirit by Richards, Frank has constantly resisted fixed categories and labels throughout his practice.

“Frank Bowling’s Americas” documents this immersion into fluidity that has now defined Frank’s life. He arrived in New York at a time where he felt outside of both British and Black American life due to his Caribbean and Black British background. The 1969 exhibition he curated at Stony Brook University, “5+1,” featured five prominent Black abstract artists—Melvin Edwards, Daniel LaRue Johnson, Al Loving, Jack Whitten, and William T. Williams—with the plus sign in the title signifying Frank as the related outlier to the group.

Rather than try to assimilate, Frank has always embraced the murkiness of fluidity, not just in life, but through his art practice as well. For Frank, mixing is where we find our commonalities rather than our differences. “The [practice] is rooted in who he is as a Black man, but it is beyond someone’s narrow categorization of him,” Ben expressed.

Of course, Frank’s commitment to pursuing his own path is exactly what allowed him to produce an expansive oeuvre that is distinct and authentic to himself. But what does he think of his recent, late-career success? “To have paintings in the U.S. and in the U.K.,” Ben said, “I think he would say, ‘What’s not to like about that?’”

Frank is ultimately someone who lives in the present. Always in search of the next project, he does not get bothered by the hullabaloo of the future nor the messiness of the past. Sacha noted that his father wouldn’t have this outlook—to be able to recognize the light—if he didn’t have the darkness.