Frank Bowling
| Frank Bowling | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling 29 February 1936 Bartica, Guyana, South America |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater |
Chelsea School of Art; Royal College of Art |
| Website | www.frankbowling.com |
Richard Sheridan Franklin Bowling OBE RA LG (born 29 February 1936), known as Frank Bowling, is a Guyana-born British artist who is widely considered to be one of the most distinguished artists to emerge from post-war British art schools. His paintings relate to Abstract expressionism, Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction.
Bowling was born in Bartica, Guyana, South America. His father was a police district paymaster and his mother a seamstress, and in 1950, at the age of 15, he moved to England, where he lived with an uncle and completed his education.
After doing his National Service in the Royal Air Force, Bowling went on to study art, despite earlier ambitions to be a poet and a writer. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art, then in 1959 won a scholarship to London's Royal College of Art, where fellow students included artists such as David Hockney, Derek Boshier, Allen Jones, R. B. Kitaj and Peter Phillips. At graduation in 1962, Hockney was awarded the gold medal while Bowling was given the silver. Bowling had been tipped to win the gold but due to his controversial 1960 marriage to Royal College Registrar Paddy Kitchen (they divorced in the late 1960s), he was relegated to silver. His first one-person exhibition, entitled "Image in Revolt," was held in London in 1962 at the Grabowski Galleries, and other exhibitions followed. However, Bowling was frustrated at being pigeonholed as a Caribbean artist; as he said in a Guardian interview with Laura Barnett: "It seemed that everyone was expecting me to paint some kind of protest art out of postcolonial discussion. For a while I fell for it. I painted a picture called the Martyrdom of Patrice Lumumba."
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