Valerie Bowes

In times when art is conceptual, virtual, digital, when artists strive to shock, to force their audience to react somehow to the dullness of everyday life, and when the public in turn seeks in contemporary art the entertainment and thrill of the amusement park, Valerie Bowes dares to swim against the tide. She uses the brush. She paints the figurative; and she paints the emotional. Her work is powerful because it communicates directly with the soul.
It takes you to the most obscure meanders of yourself, to places forgotten and removed in your subconscious, and even deeper: to the collective unconscious, where symbols have stratified through time and space, where it seems as though one could grasp the very secret of existence itself.

Valerie began studying Fine Art seriously in her twenties, prompted by a brief relationship of great significance that reopened her passion for art. She graduated with honours in Fine Art Painting in 1985 at the University of the West of England Faculty of Art and Design and then studied for a Master’s degree in Fine Art at Cardiff University. She is a brilliant draughtswoman and has an impressive sense of colour, which can even be seen in her use of black and white. Her works contain all this and go further.
This artist works by shreds, and bombards the sight with emotion and colour. Her inspirational sources, whether declared or not, are many, but all have spirituality as a leitmotif: all Italian and European art before the Renaissance, Indian art, medieval Arabic, Russian and Minoan art.

Extracts of an essay on Valerie's work by Luna Figurelli in a catalogue for a solo show in Palmero, Italy. 2006

The studio of a painter, their living space, their bookshelves and scattered collections of all the bits and pieces, found objects and treasured mememtos gathered over a lifetime reveal the history of the artist and the path they have followed; their very soul.So it is with Valerie Bowes.When one steps over the threshold of her exquisite house one enters a treasured world fashioned and created by her gentle and idiosyncratic vision. There is order here and honesty and discipline; the simplicity of careful selection.There is too a reflection of the choices she has made that echo the places she had visited or lived. Memories and palimpsests and fragments of a life dedicated to her calling and a fulfilment of her talent.Valerie Bowes has lived in Tuscany and Northern India and worked in North Africa, France, Portugal and Spain and the influences of those exotic places reveal themselves in her paintings. Hindu Art, Holy men, Angels, Byzantium, towers and monasteries, cloisters and penitents and simple people going about their daily lives are all embraced in her work. The Italian Primitives too and Medieval iconography again and again anchor these images. And then by way of relief appear feathers and dead flowers, doorways and secret places. Sometimes one catches a glimpse of the sea, a beach or a bird free of its cage sitting above an archway.In all these paintings the fundamental design carries an uncluttered message. Bold, discreet and convincing. The colour too is certain, vibrant and harmonious. And the drawings in pencil or charcoal are imbued with a poetry and clarity that stays in ones memory long after the first impression. This work, this vocation, is seriously impressive.There are many fine artists who make big names for themselves, who are cleverly marketed and sometimes trumpeted beyond their worth. That Valerie Bowes is not of that number matters not a jot for there is a fundamental truth in her art that elevates it beyond the commercial and formulaic. She is of that Brotherhood of artists who often go unheralded and unsung but nevertheless really matter.

Derek Balmer PRWA

(President of the Royal West of England Academy)

Cabot Tower, Bristol

Cabot Tower, Bristol

Cabot Tower, Bristol

Cabot Tower, Bristol

Forgotten Tower, The Mendips, Somerset

Hidden By The Light
Oil on plaster on board | 81x 123cm

Leaving Siena, Italy
Oil on plaster on board | 81 x 123cm

Deepest Winter, Krakow, Poland
Charcoal on paper | 76 x 56cm