JERMAIN DEFOE Thinking On His Feet - Mayfair Times

14 15
art
True
colours
In May 2005, the celebrated Colour Field painter Frank
Bowling became the first black Royal Academician. His
election was a landmark in the Royal Academy’s 239year
history, and a long-awaited sign of recognition for
the artist. “It was 40 years coming,” says Frank, “but
when it did come it blew me away.”
Born in Guyana in 1936, Frank came to London
when he was 15. His interest in art began in 1953
when, as a teenager completing his National Service in
London, he explored the National Gallery and Victoria
and Albert Museum. “I knew nothing about drawing or
painting, but I was hooked,” he says.
Several years and various art schools later, he
graduated from the Royal College of Art, alongside
David Hockney, R B Kitaj, Allen Jones and Derek
Boshier. The year was 1962.
Things went well, and in 1964 he exhibited at The
London Group exhibition at the Tate Gallery. But then
everything went quiet. Excluded from British group
shows and under pressure to exhibit at the first World
Festival of Negro Art in Senegal, he began to feel
“distressed”.
“I started feeling that what I was having to deal with
was the ‘black artist’ tag,” he says. “I wasn’t just an
artist or a British artist: I’d been pigeonholed, and it
began to really worry me. How does somebody like
me, being black, leap over these hurdles? There
seemed to be no way.”
For the next few years he travelled between
London and New York in a bid to find “circumstances
that would allow me to flower”. He was met with
resistance. And, although a fellowship at the
Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1967 gave him a
solid, more confident footing in America, he still felt
stifled by the “black artist” label.
Around that time, he was approached by the Art
Magazine to come on board as a writer – an offer
Frank saw as “an opportunity to express myself about
what was happening to black people in the art world.
“I went in to bat for them,” he adds, “and also for
myself, of course.
“It was a very peculiar time,” says Frank of his
writing days. “There was a feeling among the black
artists that I wasn’t for real. You know, ‘How can a guy
who paints also write?’ sort of thing. They were cruel.
Always suspicious. But I stuck it.”
A solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York in
1971 presented a welcome interruption to the drought
of exhibitions of his work. “And then I got lucky,” he
says. “I met Clement Greenberg.”
Frank forged a strong friendship with the renowned
American art critic, simultaneously absorbing
Greenberg’s thoughts on abstract art and modifying his
own painting style and approach.
“In 1971, I became an abstract artist,” Frank says
matter-of-factly. Attracted by the structure that was
central to abstract art, he created works that combined
vivid colour with strict geometry. Then, in the mid-
Seventies, he went on to experiment with his poured
paintings, to which his current show at The Arts Club
in Mayfair is dedicated.
The poured paint series was an experimental time
for Frank, when he explored “the conjunction of
chance with structure”. Although nervous about their
direction, he felt he was “on the right track… And, as I
got more confident, the paintings became what they
are now.”
His mature works combine the vibrancy of palette
of his early Colour Field paintings with seemingly
mundane plastic objects such as jam-jar tops and
vitamin-pill containers, which are embedded into the
canvas. “I chuck these things in because I feel they’re
part of my life,” he explains. “All these works serve as
an autobiography. It’s my life and everything that
concerns me goes in.”
Based on this premise, his paintings from the past
two years should be pretty exciting. Since his election
to the Royal Academy, Frank has been taken on by
ROLLO Contemporary Art – the curator of The Arts
Club show – and there is a second solo exhibition of
his works running simultaneously in New York. He
recently held a solo show at the academy. And he will
take part in a public “conversation” with the art critic
Mel Gooding at the Tate Britain on May 9.
Frank is also on the selection and hanging
AFTER YEARS OF
RELATIVE OBSCURITY,
FRANK BOWLING IS
FINALLY GAINING
THE RECOGNITION HE
HAS LONG CRAVED.
ELECTED THE
FIRST BLACK ROYAL
ACADEMICIAN IN 2005,
THE 71-YEAR-OLD
ARTIST IS NOW
BEING CELEBRATED
IN A SERIES OF
INTERNATIONAL
SHOWS. SOPHIE
BISHOP MEETS HIM
PANDORA’S BOX, 1975
committee for this year’s Summer Exhibition at the
Royal Academy – a process he has found somewhat
draining. “But I love being a member of the RA,” he
adds, “and I hope and trust that my energy sustains.
“I’m in my 70s, and I do feel that this new situation,
whereby I’m showing work in England more and more,
tends to be hard on my diminishing resources as a
human being. My mental and physical energy is being
taxed and I hope I don’t fall off the edge of the world
before I’m really satisfied with how things are going.
“If I had a big wish to whoever makes one’s wishes
come true, it would be that over the next short while
things will become satisfactory so that I feel I’ve
achieved whatever it is that I first set out to achieve.”
As I am leaving Frank’s Pimlico flat – a stone’s
throw from Tate Britain – he airs a second big wish:
that someone, somewhere in England will see right
and give him a much deserved and long-awaited
retrospective exhibition.
Frank Bowling: Poured Paintings runs until June 1
at The Arts Club, 40 Dover Street, Mayfair.
T 020 7499 8581. View by appointment only.