The New English Art Club has existed for over a century and is one of Britain’s foremost exhibiting societies and the bastion of figurative painting. Based at the Mall Galleries, NEAC is a centre of excellence for drawing and painting whose shared artistic language is one in which pictorial statements are slowly and intricately constructed, but when completed can be understood quickly and easily by everyone. It is ever evolving and capable of great spiritual depth, and this language is the Club’s main concern. Rob Withers met NEAC President, Jason Bowyer as he painted en plein air in one of his Suffolk haunts:
bring it into resolution with the muted tones of the land, or to work with a high horizon and, if you understand me, to attach the sky.” His favourite subjects range widely, from domestic interiors to sport (in 2011 he was Wimbledon Championships Artist), but his central concerns, which he terms ‘figurative abstraction’, can most readily be appreciated in his depictions of elements in the landscape. For Bowyer “The choice of an appropriate ground is an important decision, taken early in the process of making a painting”. Most often he will use light red for green foregrounds, white for clean lighting and light grey for interiors. But in Suffolk he had chosen a scraped-out canvas to allow a palimpsest to develop, intending that elements from the original, underlying image would show through the newly created surface. He pointed to a rich cream sun hat worn by a figure hunched against black-tarred Suffolk fishing sheds: “You try consciously to isolate, simplify and design. You abstract from the figurative, keeping it simple.” He swept his arm round to take in the wider scene. “Then you don’t need to include all this.” (‘All this’ was a riot
look for manufactured materials of the highest quality.” He likes Spectrum paint and emphasises that “…you mustn’t feel worried about using plenty of paint, especially when working outdoors, wet-on-wet.” Painting outdoors is important “…even if it is not where you do your best work, because it makes you aware of textures and surfaces.” Nevertheless, on his website he explains how much he now enjoys working in his studio at the Kew Bridge Steam Museum which has been a source of renewal for his observational drawing. I asked him to explain the interest for a painter. “Drawings provide so much more for the play of imagination to engage with than, say, photographs. Design is essential to painting, and drawing is design.” As a student at Camberwell College of Art, where he won the Camberwell Painting Prize, Bowyer would visit old peoples’ homes to talk with the residents and to draw. Whenever the fixed concentration of the students in the art studios became too confining, he would move into the sculpture studio to draw the sculptors and the changing structures they created. He is sad that so many colleges today appear not to recognise the importance of observational drawing,
Jason Bowyer: Rob Withers
Jason Bowyer is a painter who likes to escape the white-walled confines of the studio. He enjoys being ‘out among life’ and when we met in Walberswick I was not surprised to find him setting up his easel by the River Blyth. These windswept creeks, marshes, dunes, grey seas and big skies have always attracted artists able to rise to the challenge of finding a painting in the flat Suffolk land. For well over a century artists have visited this watery area to paint, but to compose a painting here the artist needs to have a serious attitude to the landscape; the tones of the muddy river water, the marsh and the meadows behind and the Northern European light: “The problem here is either to paint an effective sky with a very low horizon and
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RWA magazine Winter 2011
figuratively speaking
of masts, landing stages, huts, walkers, crabbers.) “Resolved painting sits between the figurative and the abstract.” Bowyer is President of The New English Art Club. At their recent exhibition in The Great Barn at Higher Ashton in Devon, I had admired his delicate painting of the Thames, a subtle analysis of feathery greens. I had imagined that he was devoted to tiny, thin brushes; I was wrong. His preference is always for big black sable, up to 3 inches wide. He created those wispy marks using the edges of large brushes. But much of his work portrays robust structures and so he makes extensive use of a palette knife. “And it’s important to use the best. Often I prepare my own boards for sketching, but I also
seeming to be largely concept-based. “To be a good painter you have got to work with both concept and craft, but ‘craft’ is a word that has become debased in English art circles.” Membership of the NEAC has given Bowyer support, conversations with practicing artists and opportunities for exhibitions and to encourage new artists in their development. “Organisations such as the NEAC and the RWA provide links between established artists and the younger generation coming out of college, who might otherwise find themselves adrift after the initial impact and excitement of their work has died down and the galleries have lost interest. To have a successful, lifelong career as an artist you must continue to learn