Interview with Day Bowman: Treading Between Abstraction and Figuration

Day Bowman’s paintings recreate the coastal landscape of her childhood home; capturing the tide, the peppery grey sand and the sunlight as it beams down and laps up the sea. With a style which treads the tangential boundary between abstraction and figuration, Day creates complex and inquisitive works full of movement, colour and wonder.

How has 2023 been for you so far?

Hmmm, well tricky due to ill health. It seems as though the latest Covid booster jab triggered something in my immune system than caused a near complete breakdown, so seven weeks later I am slowly emerging from the experience; yesterday was the first day back in the studio so things are looking up!

What does an average day at the studio look like for you at the moment?

My answer to that relates the previous question but normally I go to the studio each morning – I'm very much a morning painter – and work there for about three to four hours. Grab a bit of lunch and then slowly wash my brushes surveying the work I've done that morning; sometimes I'm happy with the results and often there is work to be done!

Scale is important to me. I love working large so that my whole body is gesturally creating the marks and slashes and brushstrokes. But then on other days I find that I need to work things out on a smaller scale. I often see the small works as preparations for the larger works.

What does the English seaside mean as a theme in your practice?

Growing up in a holiday destination, small seaside town it's not surprising that much of my work has referenced the sea, the beach and the littoral.

In the Plashy Place Series there is a remembrance of wet sand glistening, the incoming and receding tides erasing the calligraphic marks etched momentarily in the surface and where the beach, quite literally, becomes the canvas of my childhood.

The Fortress Series is a reflection on how Britain sees itself: a nation apart or part of global community. And, for me, they echo the small sandcastles we patted out during the long summer holidays.

Most recently my gaze has moved towards the inshore landscapes and beyond. 

How important is it to you to explore a certain theme or idea through series?

It is strange how my work has developed through series. it was not intentional. It's about wanting to say more than just one visual paragraph, if you get my drift.

Take for example the Plashy Place Series which came about through my reflecting on my childhood home town of Minehead and thinking back on how the tide – which has the longest reach in the UK – would leave these little castles of sand created by the lugworms.  Hey presto and through the magic of the internet I discovered that W.B. Yeats had written of these creatures in: The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland. The poem is a story of a man who tries to escape from the world of reality to a world of imagination and who wants to run away from the worries and responsibilities of the material world. The simple lugworm singing in the poem is, for me, a metaphor for the trials and tribulations we all experience at differing moments in our lives.

How do you know when to move on from one series to the next, or do you work on multiple at once?

When to finish a series? Well, it's a bit like when to finish a painting – when there is nothing further to add. For me, painting has its own rhythm and then sometimes life gets in the way such as the recently ill-health experience and so these factors impact on how and when I can paint.

At the moment I am deeply involved in a series entitled Marking Out the Boundaries which addresses the way we interpret the rural landscapes of today and questions why the land has been parcelled up in the way it is. There is a sentimentally promulgated by television programmes, holiday tour companies and by painters down the ages about this bucolic landscape but two hundred years ago the land did not resemble the patchwork quilt of shape and colour. The landscape of today owes much to the Enclosure Acts of the 1820s that allowed the wealthy farmer and landowner to buy up great tracts of land for their sole use and profit. John Clare, the celebrated English poet, writes achingly about this lost landscape in his poem ‘Remembrance’.

The Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton, Devon is currently staging an exhibition entitled Paradise Found which brings together the works of some of the Camden School Group of painters and contemporary painters. Marking Out the Boundaries 3 is part of this ongoing exhibition. It was great to see that John Jones of The Guardian listed as one of his top 5 shows.

Were there any moments or people that you feel shaped the way you paint today?

Discovering the Abstract Expressionists, both American and the English equivalent in The Cornish School at art school has be one of the most releasing experiences.

When someone experiences your work for the first time, what impression do you hope it might leave on them?

I think the French have the right expression for it: a 'coup de foudre’. In other words, to hit you between the eyes and also connect in some way viscerally.

What are you looking forward to – making, seeing or showing – in the near future?

I guess you know my answer to this from what I have said earlier: making, making and making! Yes, I love being part of and visiting exhibitions, and in Britain we are never far from a really good gallery or museum, but I have lost much time this year and I'd like a good long stretch in the studio to work through ideas on the current series: Marking Out the Boundaries.