Biography: Mark Bowles is a native Californian artist whose large-scale canvases capture both a sense and scene of the western landscape. He has been working as a painter for thirty years and studied at the California College of Arts (and Crafts) in Oakland and the Institudio Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. These studies are coupled with the artist’s commitment to his work, which over time has resulted in a body of evolving imagery that maintains a stylistic consistency while exploring fresh territory. The artist states that, …It is always my intention to address the canvas directly, honestly, and boldly. This premise is evident when considering his present scope of mature work.
“New Landscapes - Expanding the View” illustrates hallmark characteristics of the painter. The artist prefers large-scale canvases to 60 x 70”. This scale creates a broad field of color on a vast visual picture plane. It also provides the opportunity to visually read a piece observing bold areas of color intermingled with subtle painterly passages. One is reminded of the work of Richard Diebenkorn whose paintings the artist admires.
Bowles’ landscapes are individual statements that have emerged with individuality from a rich tradition of California landscape painting. Unlike his friend, Gregory Kondos, Mark Bowles is not a plein-air painter although he finds time in the field crucial to his artistic sensibility. Mark prefers the solitude of the studio to address painting infrastructure and color interplay which eventually find placement in a finished work. Whereas many practicing Northern California landscape painters find richness with riparian settings or city-scapes, Bowles primarily features the broad plains of the Central Valley as his favored subject matter. Often, distinctive landmarks are visible in a setting that is on the verge of abstraction.
Bowles’s paintings are subjective, reductively simple, and filled with blazing light and color—a harmonious balance between the landscape he knows well and his passion for abstraction and the physical act of painting.
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