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"Portrait of a Queen", 2013

Noah NJ Bowman - Order in chaos.


By Elliot J. Nitkin

rder in chaos.

That is the beauty in abstract painting.

Cohesion of colour, of shape, of movement, mastering these talents is something few can achieve when painting abstract work.  Abstract painting, good abstract painting, is not simply throwing paint on a canvass.

This is the big misconception.  Yes, anyone can paint on a canvass.  What takes real talent is being able to tell a story, invoke thought, make people consider both the presentation as a presentation and perhaps as a comment on social issues that the artist wants to explore.

Noah NJ Bowman is just such an artist.  His work transcends mere imagery by explaining the human condition through an abstract narrative.

Each line, in and of itself, is a line of colour.  It is the piece as a whole - from which you must step back and consider from the centre out - you have to try to understand to see that he is trying to comment on the human experience.

Abstract artists remove all but the essential elements of the subject they paint.  What is essential to them constitutes the story they want to tell.  How you react to that story helps you to gain an affinity for the piece.

Here are Noah’s words:

“The paintings I’m proposing are strong in gestural movement but relevant to contemporary discourses in that they are visceral and rhetorical by metaphors and symbols used to describe the conscious struggle to exist in a society of idealisms and unseen beauty or truth. The idea that in the gesture is an existence or resemblance of the figurative as a sensation to the viscera.

It stems from Gilles Deleuze’s idea of the figurative as a metaphor to the movement and structural framework is powerful and as visceral as a brushstroke on the canvas. My work evolves around the blurring or fragment of the figurative form as these pictorial forms create metaphors, symbols and familiar representations from our consciousness.

The painting style I’ve developed has been referred to as f abstract (figurative abstract).

The all over gestural and expressive brushstrokes allow for a sense of spontaneity and raw emotion to occur in fragmented moments throughout the canvas. The canvas is sectioned and learned through a post-cubism study where fields and layers of color blend the figure in pictorial space.

My painting concepts are relative to artworks of Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse and the writings of Deleuze, Freud, Sarte, and Foucault. I paint primarily with acrylic paints because the layering process is quick and it allows the paint to dry quicker than an oil paint and therefore increases the depth sooner in the blending process.”

If you would like to see his work showcased in your space, please feel free to click on “Start a project” >

We will be happy to show you his work.

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