What's new and what's next?

upcoming exhbition:   The Affordable Art Fair, Battersea Park, London   Thursday 12 - Sunday 15 March 2009.  

This will be a display of recent coloured nudes, including some of those you can see in my  "2008 drawings" page.

Exhibition by Nicholas Bowlby.       www.nicholasbowlby.co.uk

Many artists like to work within a limited range of subject and gradually evolving style, which dealers prefer and encourage.

I find I need to work in various ways, large and small, 2D and 3D, explorations of ideas and perceptions of a multi-faceted world. My current emphasis is on drawing and sculpture based simply on the human figure.  What is common to all these is a fascination with carving, with finding and clarifying possible active form, and this is identical to the pursuit of virtual form in drawn images. The drawings come from a fascination with using bright colour and active line to create luminous sculptural depth; the sculptures are similar, an exploration of complex surface, an investigation maybe of our thick skin.

What work is available?  Many of the drawings in Drawings 2008, and others like them.  this is an on-going series.  Similarly with the Sculpture 2008.    Various other earlier items as well, you should ask.

I continue to make a few small scale things, as jewellery, to commission or because I've found some nice material to use or some new tool.   At present I have some mammoth tusk ivory.  I still love to carve and construct these tiny images, it just takes a lot longer because they're harder to see.

 As well as this, I'm interested in the idea of Intervention, an accepted art form: what one places in the public arena becomes susceptible to active response by other artists, as the art world itself becomes a forum carrying our shared and evolving awareness of our cultural collective. This goes beyond the usual critical commentator's verbiage towards juxtapositions of object and performance: often satirical, exposing weakness, but as with any good satire doing this in a way that has sufficient wit and aesthetic merit to extend the comment beyond the personal to the background or context that gave rise to the apparent blindness by artist, curator or critic. 

But this can also be intended as an interactive respect for ideas and images that have come to several of us, that are present as qualities within the culture.  Mass publication and access to museums means we have a wide inheritance of styles, of concerns and solutions, a shared language, and that inevitably gives rise to shared thought.  One way to study art and develop a personal focus is to actively work through the relevant history and developments in the sequence they occurred, doing this as a practical progression of past discoveries alongside a study of their social background and function, in order to arrive up to date with a fuller understanding of ourselves, our languages and the world.  This is a continuous process, and can be done interactively, alongside others.  The generalisation of values brought about by today's breadth of access to art can cause confusion of identity, just as mass fashions can induce weakness, which may be good for business but since the arts are involved in the PR industry getting away with it, the arts can also be responsiblefor restoring individual and social focus: someone said one is always either a student or a victim.   Importantly this study can address and help to resolve real problems caused by the insistance of certain historians and critics on concepts like globalisation, the avant garde, acceptance of market forces as benign, and originality.

In a way, the Royal Academy's plinth affaire was just such an intervention on my part into their creative performance of the Summer Exhibition, the public response indicating that this was relevant and justified.

From this point of view I'm at present working with a small group of other sculptors with differing backgrounds and inherited views in an exploration where we each produce responses to the others' work, complementary, interactive, extending awareness of shared or opposed cultural background. This will hopefully result in an exhibition called something like "Dancing Partners".