“The Painter as Musician: Graham Fowler’s Water Music” Ask any musician. They’ll tell you there’s rhythm, movement, and harmonies to be found in most painting. As a jazz and classical musician-composer, what draws me to Graham Fowler’s paintings is the extraordinary musicality of his work. By “musicality” I mean the…
Painter Graham Fowler’s explorations of water, its descriptive, formal behaviours and its cultural and its even metaphysical meanings, tend to honour above all the mystery of, the primacy of its surfaces (the title of this exhibition is “Water and the Impermanence of Surface”). In painting after painting, the Saskatchewan-based artist…
In 2002 I traveled to Roatan, Honduras, the location of a marine reserve park. There, using scuba diving as a tool, something I had been preparing for during the previous two years, I photographed for the first time the liquid world. The experience of diving was a revelation to me.…
Fowler's art is first and foremost a meditation on the ineffable. His work is founded on a belief in the convergence of the rational and the poetic, and aims both to end our feelings of estrangement from the natural world, and provide for the possibility of emotional and spiritual reunification.…
Representation as a Language of Form "The function of artistic illusion is not make believe but the very opposite, disengagement from belief . The knowledge that what is before us has no practical significance in the world is what enables us to give attention to its appearance as such." Susanne…
Graham Fowler: Artist's Statement The paintings in this exhibition are derived from nature and produced from photographs in a studio environment. Nature provides the motif in my painting, photography the means. Photography acts as a contemporary sketchbook, a data collector that provides information. Rather than replicate Kodac, I use the…
In the early 1970s, when Graham Fowler began his training as an artist. he initially placed himself in the tradition of twentieth-century abstract art. His early work, a series of large colour-field paintings completed while he was a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax,…