Frank Bowling: A Conversation

Frank Bowling: My work emerged round about the time of all the turmoil in Africa. Patrice Lumumba and all that. My paintings were concerned with that, you know. The. sort of people I used to hang with, from Canada and Australia and those places, we were all into something that had to do with this grand idea of the British Commonwealth.! mean, the emphasis on Guyana was personal in that I was involved in painting pictures that were reminiscent of New Amsterdam, and my imagination of it.... I did pictures of a girl going to school, because, some people, like my youngest brother went to school at Cotton Tree on the West coast of Berbice. He had to take a boat at six o'clock every morning, and when you got to the other side of the river, you had to take a bus. Now if you missed that bus you had to walk. Walking to school was a big number for me. So when I painted anything that had to do with Guyana, it was like that. What I was hot about was the Congolese thing, it set me off. I made scores of paintings about that; when they were dragging off Lumumba in a cage! All those pictures that came out on the front pages of the newspaper , right? So really, even though my subject matter was not Marilyn Monroe, I was painting the kinds of pictures that would have been classified as Pop-Art. But some how, it became "Expressionist Figuration", where I was lumped with Francis Bacon. Okwui Enwezor: What was your relationship to Pop-Art? F. B.: Well, you know I was there working at the same time with all the people who emerged from Pop-Art. What I was saying earlier, was that everybody who was making ambitious paintings worked from photographs. And photography was naturally concerned with what was in the news, like Marilyn Monroe. A lot of people painted things about Marilyn Monroe; I!iDBJournal of Contemporary African Art· Spring 1996 Frank BowLing: A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe Frank Bowling is certainly one of the most significant artists to emerge from England in the 1960s, among the others being David Hockney, his contemporary at the Royal College ofArt, London who, also, was awarded the RCA gold-medal in 1962 that many believe rightly belonged to Bowling. Bowling received the Silver medal instead, and in 1965 was awarded the Grand Prize for Contemporary Art at the 1st World Festival of Negro Art in Dakar, Senegal in 1965. In 1971 Bowling was honored with a solo show at the Whitney Museum. He was a close associate of the critic Clement Greenberg, as well as numerous artists including Larry Rivers, Frank O'Hara, Al Loving and Jack Whitten. For several years, also, Bowling was an editor of Arts Magazine in New York during which period he brought many artists to the attention of the mainstream art world. In the past two decades Bowling has divided his time between his studios in London and New York where in 1995, the following conversation took place in his Brooklyn loft studio. but my emphasis, what I was painting, was the changing situation and what was emerging from that sort of change, like the Belgians gave up the Congo and the British gave up Kenya and places like that. Olu Oguibe: That fascinates me because, while Ron Kitaj and David Hockney were introducing the issue of sexuality into art at that point - what was important to you was post-coloniality. F. B.: That's right! And the dire level of Blacks and minority people emerging out of that. David was interested in Mahatma Ghandi and Auden. But Cliff Richard was his idol. We all had our little thing, but what was so curious was that apart from the very short space of time, the things that I was interested in didn't seem to figure in the same way as the thing Ron Kitaj was interested in, even though we were classified as the same generation, doing similar things. Suddenly, in order to deal with me, they made a different classification that was entitled, "Expressionist Figuration...