| Author: | ROY PROCTOR |
| Date: | Sep 23, 2007 |
| Start Page: | G.12 |
| Section: | Flair |
| Text Word Count: | 663 |
Sally Bowring, a powerhouse art administrator and teacher as well as a top-tier Richmond painter for decades, made two crucial discoveries when she turned 60.
One was a heightened sense of her mortality.
The other: plastic spray bottles, the sort she can buy at any home-improvement warehouse.
After having only five solo exhibitions since 2000, Bowring now has three running in Vermont and upstate New York as well as at Reynolds Gallery.
She created all but one of the nine glowing abstract paintings at Reynolds Gallery since May.
"I've been busy," she acknowledges. She is sitting amid nine square works that were inspired by plants that surround her chapel-like studio in her Bellevue garden and then, in her telling, "went somewhere else."
Is her new energy born of urgency?
Bowring, now 61, sniffs at the word from somewhere within her mass of graying hair, then rejects it.
"I'm just rolling along, not making up for lost time," she says.
"I don't feel infinite anymore. I want to do fewer things and do them better. I still teach art, but I'm not an administrator now. Painting is my top priority, along with my husband."
In the view of Bowring the artist, she's getting better and better.
Many observers would agree.
"The older you get, the more you hone your ideas, your technical ability," she says. "I pulled up something that I did in the late '80s recently, and everything I'm doing now was in that piece -- I was surprised -- but it was much more confused.
"Too much color, too much everything.
"In that early work, I was trying to figure out what my work was about and how to make it, just as I was trying to figure out who I was and how to live my life. Now I know myself better, and I can spend more time on the creative process."
Now about those spray bottles. . .
Filled with subtle gradations of color and texture as their plant-like and other forms float lazily in their fields, Bowring's current work seems born of the paintbrush.
Surprise!
Only two of the paintings were worked with a brush at all.
In the others, Bowring achieved her effects solely by spraying enamel acrylic paint, which gives the works their sheen, onto her birch panels. She created the images with what she calls "reverse stencils," a kind of masking process.
"My work has always involved trying to find new ways of using paint," she explains. "I don't have any plan when I start a painting -- no sketches, no preconceived idea. A lot of the time I can't control the spray bottle, and that's what I like."
She prefers acrylics because of their fast-drying properties and intense colors.
She favors birch panels over canvas because it gives her a hard surface.
All of Bowring's new paintings are either 24 or 60 inches square.
To Bowring, unlike most painters, square formats are a no-brainer.
"Squares are part of the domestic and feminist vocabulary," she says. "They're two things. They make reference to things like quilts, but they're totally abstract.
"A horizontal rectangle refers to the landscape, and a vertical rectangle refers to the figure. A square does neither. I had a representational period very early on, but I'm much more comfortable with abstraction. I can use my humor, my intellect. I can layer meaning, all without being didactic."
So where does Bowring stand as she proceeds deeper into her 60s?
"I serve good food at home, and I'm trying to serve equally good, rich food aesthetically," she says. "I really care about what I put into the world, and I care about putting beauty into my work."
She smiles sheepishly, almost guiltily.
"I know that sounds old-fashioned, but I'm not sure I'm old-fashioned."
* * *
ART EXHIBIT:
What: "Sally Bowring: Dancing in the Dark" (paintings)
Where: Reynolds Gallery, 1514 W. Main St.
When: Through Oct. 27
Info: (804) 355-6553
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO
Credit: Special Correspondent