Rush Green 1977

Frank Bowling’s Rush Green seems to have come into being through an accumulation of layered colours, worked into being through action and chance, through trial, error, and intuition. I can almost feel Bowling’s presence here, working the surface, maybe even coaxing those rivulets of colour downward. It's so evocative of what paint can do, how it can flow and pool and stain. Look at how the pinks and greens slide down the canvas, as if in slow motion, drawing our eyes down with them! And the splatters of yellow and gold – what were they put there for? It is as though they fell by accident, or were flicked on with intention. Bowling’s experiments with gravity and viscosity remind me of Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique. All these artists are in conversation across time, pushing the boundaries of painting and inspiring one another’s creativity. For Bowling, painting becomes a form of embodied expression, a dialogue with the materials themselves. He embraces ambiguity and uncertainty, and that approach invites multiple interpretations. There's no fixed reading here.