Gary R. Bowling

Far a long time I have been curious about people’s collective sense of place as well as their individual sense of place. I came to see the environment as an extension of my body space. I grew to believe that what a place is like in each person’s experience is not just some kind of definitive snapshot of a location. Rather, an individual’s sense of a place, any place, evolves as a multi layered experience derived from many previous experiences with that place and those of a multitude of similar places that the mind draws on to build the quivering reality we each identify as “this moment in this place.” So, the landscape became my subject matter, but the layered complexity of my sense of a place and moment was what I have intended to explore and try to convey in my art.

Half a century ago I came across the sentiment, “A purpose of art is to make that which is invisible … visible.” This idea became a guiding principle in my creative process. “Landscape” suggests an almost universal set of environmental experiences that we share; it has a well-developed set of conventions that we generally understand in our culture; yet, so much of our environment is overlooked or relegated to the status of “background”.  It is often invisible.

Life often conspires to drive us so far into our individual problems that a cloak of invisibility comes to shroud the extraordinary wonder around us. I intend for my paintings to clarify my own sense of the wonderous. I hope my paintings can be a vehicle that carries viewers toward seeing and feeling wonder and beauty more richly.

“Only the ephemeral is of lasting value” attributed to Eugene Ionesco is another belief that has become a guiding principle for my work. The ugly, the beautiful, the dramatic, the mundane, the common may each be utterly lacking in any sense of the ephemeral, or they can each be bathed in an evident ephemerality. Not that all of my work is proof that I believe that a primary purpose of art is to make the invisible visible, nor that it rises to the lasting value of the ephemeral, but I wish to.

Gary Bowling