Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA

Rachel IV 1989 is a painting in acrylic on canvas in a portrait format, its height more than double its width. The surface of the work is richly textured. Bowling applied acrylic gels directly onto the canvas and reworked the paint with a spatula. This layering creates a rippling effect and gives the work a sculptural quality, as the repeated lines created by the edges of the spatula extend outwards from the canvas. The dominant tones in which the work is painted are light browns, ochre, light greys and bronze, with localised patches of blue, yellow and red. Like many other paintings Bowling made between 1987 and 1990, Rachel IV is characterised by a reflective translucence, the varying orientation of different parts of the surface reflecting light differently and giving the work a great sense of movement and change.

Bowling had worked in an entirely abstract mode since the early 1970s. By the late 1980s his work was becoming more expressive and demonstrated an increasing concern with the effects and reflective qualities of light and water, as well as the luminous potential of acrylic paints. This and the thick impasto reflect Bowling’s interest in the work of English landscape painters such as J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), as well as the riverside locations of Bowling’s studios in London and New York. By the time he made Rachel IV, Bowling was dividing his time between America and Britain, working in the spring and autumn in New York and in the summer and winter in London. Rachel IV was painted in a second studio that Bowling began renting in London for a period in the 1980s, in Cable Street, close to the Thames at Wapping and from which, through a gap in London dockside buildings, one could just glimpse the gleaming river.

Rachel IV is one of four paintings bearing the name of Bowling’s wife, Rachel Scott, though to date all four have never been shown together (Rachel I, Rachel II and Rachel III were shown together in the exhibition Frank Bowling, Traingone at the Spritmuseum, Stockholm in 2014). Over three and a half metres of canvas were rolled out across Bowling’s Cable Street studio. Every 900 millimetres or so, an expanse was marked off with tape by Rachel. The artist spread tones of deep browns, greys, bronze and ochre gels across this large, partitioned canvas. Moving from the first to the fourth painting in the series, the gradation of colours changes from warmer to cooler tonalities. The earth tones of these paintings were similar to those of a handmade patchwork dress worn by Rachel. Bowling was fascinated by the colours and texture of the fabrics and wools used by Rachel in her textile and weaving work. The paintings also share similar tonalities to those of early cubist works seen by Bowling later that year in a landmark exhibition – Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, Museum of Modern Art, New York (Whitley 2014, p.53).

It was at the time of the making of Rachel IV that Bowling had begun exploring the possibilities of accruing gels in order to create surface effects, as if sculpting bas-reliefs. As well as in the four paintings titled after his wife, he explored this technique in the Great Thames series, large paintings characterised by reflective and glimmering surfaces, whose titles refer to London’s River Thames. These paintings were composed in what the art critic Mel Gooding has described as Bowling’s ‘controlled automatism’, whereby the final work is not the outcome of a premeditated plan but the result of a series of choices and controlled accidents (Gooding 2015, p.112). Gooding has also described how Bowling’s works from this period, rather than detached descriptions of man and his landscape, are renderings of embodied experiences of land, of the physical world and its particularities of colour and light (Gooding 2015, p.115). Bowling has remarked that ‘the painting was organised in the way people structure themselves, in the way we are, we walk, we live in buildings and express life in opposition to minimalism, enclosure and death’ (conversation with Tate curator Elena Crippa, 15 November 2017).

Further reading
Mel Gooding, Frank Bowling, London 2015, pp.104–15.
Zoe Whitley, ‘The Weight of Colour, Frank Bowling’s 1980s Paintings’, in Frank Bowling, Traingone, exhibition catalogue, Spritmuseum, Stockholm 2014, pp.52–3.
Elena Crippa (ed.), Frank Bowling, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2019.

Elena Crippa
November 2017, revised October 2020