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What you will find here

is the personal website and blog of Sterling Bowen. I’m an abstractionist, teacher, curator and writer living in Raleigh, NC. On this site you’ll find content about not only my practice but also others which I find inspiring, arranged like so:

  • “galleries” of my paintings (current and past)
  • posts about my installation work
  • blogs about my practice- paintings or objects, teaching or curating, sometimes long-form (concepts and theories)
  • artists who also make non-figurative work- there is a link and at least one image of 1,400+ and counting
  • search hashtags for artists (tags are listed with each post as well)
  • peruse a thumbnail diary of artworks (for those of you that forget artists’ names but not their work or who prefer to scan for what interests you)
  • AND of course a search bar if you know the name of an artist for which you’re looking for content or images

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BTW, “yes” the name of this blog is a reference to Arthur Danto’s collection of essays After the End of Art.

What you see is what you see

Somehow I published this post earlier before it was finished – the challenges of blogging from a phone… apologies for being bad at technology.

This weekend I found out about Frank Stella’s passing while I was down at Artfields showing and talking about a work titled Life’s Meaning is Enhanced by Its Fleeting and Transient Nature. Thanks, universe…

Frank had some training as an artist but it was not his major at Princeton, and he freely admitted to having no mimetic facility or interest. My point is that his practice was all about materiality- 100% abstractionist from the jump. I hadn’t realized that until I started reading up on him a bit for this blog. As someone who didn’t consider myself an artist until I discovered abstraction I certainly relate.

Like many art majors I met the “protractors” first. I didn’t make hard edge paintings early in my journey although I did end up there at one point. I didn’t realize until writing this blog that my reason for embracing a direct approach to opticality was also a reaction, in my case to the seriousness of an academic environment, in Frank’s to what turned out to be the broad strokes of Art history. And while those explorations were separated by half a century of time and a cultural gulf (I was reacting to the reaction to his reaction) our shared intent was to center the viewer on their perceptions- “what you see is what you see.” To put Frank’s famous quote in full context, “all I want anyone to get out of my paintings is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any conclusion”- with immediacy.

Blah blah blah- Jerry Saltz has much wiser things to say about him of course (had- article is from 2015). And I don’t just say that ’cause JS also thinks the Polish Village series is fire*. I also really liked this Megan O’Grady article from the NYT in 2020– link should get the first ten of you that use it past the pay wall.

*Here’s my Pinterest gallery of his work from the early ’70s which is some of my favorite.

#frankstella

William Baziotes

Baziotes was an American painter known for his luminous abstractions of biomorphic forms. Though he is considered an Abstract Expressionist, Baziotes’s work remained outside the dominant aspects of the movement. His paintings are in many ways more closely aligned with the early Surrealist works of Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Robert Motherwell.

#williambaziotes

Alice Baber

like Vasa was (posthumously) included in Taylor Graham‘s booth at EXPO Chicago. Alice produced brilliantly colored abstract expressionist oil and watercolor paintings by staining her canvases with rounded biomorphic forms. Using a technique of pouring diluted oil paint onto a canvas in layers, she sometimes experimented with variations of a single hue and at other times created a purposeful interplay of different tones

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#alicebaber

Vasa

For EXPO Chicago, Taylor Graham staged an exhibition (which included works by Vasa, or Vasa Mihich) noting that “it is fascinating to explore the commonalities and differences among paintings and sculptures encompassing a range of mid-century into the 21st century abstract styles, including hard edge, stain, Light and Space acrylic sculpture, synchromist inspired, and kinetic sculpture.”

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#vasa

Agnes Denes

is one of several artist included in Abstraction after Modernism: Recent Acquisitions which highlights work made by succeeding generations of artists who forged new paths in their approaches to non-representational art. Agnes work while non-figurative is much closer to the lineage of conceptual art than abstract painting or sculpture.

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#agnesdenes

Idris Khan

Drawing on diverse cultural sources including literature, history, art, music and religion, Khan has developed a unique narrative involving densely layered imagery that inhabits the space between abstraction and figuration and speaks to the themes of history, cumulative experience and the metaphysical collapse of time into single moments.

#idriskhan

Thomas Sills

I saw below during a recent visit to the Greenville County Museum of Art, which hosted an exhibit of his work in 2022. Sills’ first solo exhibition was held at Betty Parsons Gallery in May 1955. He experimented with color and form his entire career, moving from the action painting of Abstract Expressionism to vibrant Color Field painting with energetic palettes and juxtapositions.
#thomassills

Alfred Manessier

Saw below recently at the Bechtler. (from the show placard) “Inspired by the environment of his birthplace in northern France, Alfred Manessier began to paint landscapes at an early age. Although his work became increasingly abstract in the postwar period, landscape subjects persisted throughout his career-specific places, indeterminate settings, and, as in Northern Spring, the seasons and his impressions of being in nature. The painting doesn’t portray recognizable objects; nevertheless, the lush green background teeming with jewel-like dabs of color surrounding a bright orange “sun” calls to mind a field of flowers in bloom.”

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#alfredmanessier