Interview With Mark Bowles Pt.1

When You’re Honest With What You Do, That’s The That People Enjoy.

One of my 2013 resolutions is to update this blog more frequently. One of the most popular and enjoyable posts for me was the interview of Jose Digregorio. So in the coming year I plan on doing one interview a month! *

 

There is about 30 minutes of really goof stuff that isn’t in the following interview. Not because it was “off the record, which would make my process sound cool and edgy. But in reality, I forgot to hit the record button! Yes that means this interview was even longer! Enjoy  :)

Mark Bowles-Shadow-Acrylic On Canvas-50" x 50"- 2012

Bowles’ landscapes are individual statements that have emerged with individuality from a rich tradition of California landscape painting. Unlike his friend, Gregory Kondos, Mark Bowles is not a plein-air painter although he finds time in the field crucial to his artistic sensibility. Mark prefers the solitude of the studio to address painting infrastructure and color interplay which eventually find placement in a finished work. Whereas many practicing Northern California landscape painters find richness with riparian settings or city-scapes, Bowles primarily features the broad plains of the Central Valley as his favored subject matter. Often, distinctive landmarks are visible in a setting that is on the verge of abstraction.  

Scott Shields, Ph. D.Chief Curator, Crocker Art Museum 

Jeff Musser: Sacramento is well known for Theibaud and Kondos, how was it painting the way you paint, and not be labeled, “Oh he obviously has been influenced by Theibaud or Kondos,” because it’s obvious when you look around town at other landscape people. I mean you can see it and know; this person either went to Sac City College or UC Davis. Your work is obviously yours.

Marl Bowles:  Well I’m well aware of that, but I grew up in the Bay Area, and I went to Arts & Crafts in Oakland. So I was exposed to Bay Area painters;   Diebenkorn, Bischoff, David Park, all of that whole school, even though they were much older than me.

JM Yeah you can see a lot of Diebenkorn in there.

Richard Diebenkorn-Ocean Park #83- Oil On Canvas-100" X 81"-1975

Mark Bowles-Night Fall-Acrylic On Canvas-50" x 40"-2012

So I knew just as much about Kondos or Theibaud as anybody. So I wasn’t influence by them much, and didn’t even know they lived in Sacramento. I’ve been painting my whole life, my mom was an artist, so I started showing and selling work when I was in high school. When I went to college at arts & crafts I was selling work in Sausalito, doing different experimental works with tar and cement, and then doing landscapes. Living in the Bay Area with the rolling hills, it is a very pastoral area, with cows and nature and all of that. So when we moved to Sacramento because of the economy, I wanted to stay home and paint, we wanted to have kids, Debbe wanted to focus on her career, so financially we couldn’t stay in the Bay Area, we had to move somewhere else, and Sacramento was the spot. So I came up here and started painting, and it wasn’t for several years before I met Kondos. 

I met his wife, Moni, first, then I met Gregory, but if I look at work I did, say from the 70’s, it looks like Kondos. So there is this sensibility about how you approach the landscape, which we both have, for whatever reason. And he’s considered a Bay Area painter too, he’s very well known in the Bay Area now. But I wasn’t aware of him when I was there, but now we’re very good friends. He was here in my studio the other night and we did a critique of my new work.  He wanted to see what I was working on, and it was incredibly valuable he’s an incredible teacher and he helped choose some of the paintings that are going to be used for a show in Tucson (AZ)

So he’s really quite incredible, but there are so many people who copy him here. I mean it’s just distasteful that there are so many people that make a dime from being an artist who don’t do the work.

JM -Chuckles-

MB You know I’ve put in 40, 50 years of painting, maybe 80 grand in education, so I’ve paid my dues.

JM Yeah, it’s very apparent, you can go to any gallery, whether they are open or not over the past few years, and point and say, “Oh, yeah that.”

MB And it’s pretty unabashed and there’s a market for it. People seem proud that they can copy and make a living of it and galleries are happy selling it because it makes money. But when it comes into the world of art, and process, and what’s important, it’s very superficial. I find much more meaning in my life, to be able to do something that’s more unique with the canvas, that’s hugely important to me.

JM I think that a lot of people that are interested in art or what do be artists, don’t take that into account, because this is a long term investment kind of a lifestyle, with little or usually no return on investment ever.

MB Yeah it’s hard.

JM I struggle with this everyday, how did you keep going despite it all? I remember back in 2006 when we met, you discussed certain times when you just refused to get a “job.”

“I’m artist, this is what I do, and it’s my job!”  How did you do that?

MB Well one, I was married so there was an income, so I’m indebted to that. But there was an income, not a huge one. We learned and grew up with a lot less compared to a lot of our friends. We weren’t buying homes, we weren’t going on vacations, we weren’t buying boats, and we weren’t going to Disneyland. We would go someplace maybe once a year, but much less compared to a normal family. There’s nothing else that ever interested me as much as painting, nothing that I ever got such a reward from. I wasn’t very good in school, the way I learn is very different that the way they teach. Which is common, as I get older I can see, the way the public schools teach doesn’t fit every kid. And I was one of those kids. So my self-esteem came from the praise or reward I could receive from the artwork I was making, plus I loved doing it and always have. So the thought of another career, I mean I’ve thought about it, my dad was a court reporter, so I thought about that.

JM Good lord! Um, well I’m sure it’s a great job for some people but…

MB It’s a job that makes money, that’s all it is. My dad used to say he was a glorified secretary, and he was not happy doing it, but his mom did it so he did it, and it made a lot of money, but he was not a happy man. So seeing that I knew that money doesn’t make you happy. And my mother being an artist, she really pushed that you need to find what you want to do, something unique about it. And my wife was ok with it. So understood it for whatever reason

JM Which is AMAZING! The fact that you can find a close friend that’s not an artist who understands, let alone a life partner is HUGE!

MB Yeah. A lot of her friends didn’t understand why she would support me, they just didn’t get it. A lot of times, I was being teased about why was I being supported by a woman, you know staying home with the kids. It was kind of new at that time, now it’s more common, but there was this big question mark around me.

JM “What kind of a man would allow the woman to be the bread winner?”

MB Right. “ What kind of a man would want to stay home with the kids? And who would want to be an artist anyway?” So many people had a huge question mark just about that. It doesn’t mean anything now, but at the time it meant something, not much. But that’s the good thing about getting older, you just don’t care.

JM I’ve found that as well, I’m not old, but thinking about how I was at 25 vs. now…

MB (laughs) It just doesn’t matter. Obviously you don’t want to be a fool or destructive to anyone else’s life. But we’re all here and need to do what we’re here to do while we’re alive. You get to do what you want to do and make your own choices in life, and choose your life how you want it to be. Having to worry about someone else’s judgment is really detrimental, you should be fulfilled, cause this is a short lifespan. It’s a terrible thing to waste as they say. So I’m older, my career is established, I don’t feel stagnant. 

Every time I paint, I’m absolutely in love with it; the process not the paintings. Still, they go through the complete cycle. From the beginning, here I go, I have to take myself through this journey, making it difficult and resolving problems and resolving the painting and coming up on the end and being absent from the painting. To be able to see that it has to stand on its’ own, and what I’m learning to do now is enjoy that minute and make that time longer. And not putting it away and say great I’m onto the next one. Take time to enjoy it and not punish myself so much, not grab a canvas right away and start the journey over again. Every painting to me, for some reason, I put myself into a struggle position. I make sure that if the painting happens too easy, I’m not happy with it.

JM (laughs)

MB It would great if I could … but for me it doesn’t work that way.

JM Human beings don’t value something we don’t have to work for. In relation to art, if you wait for inspiration, the clouds to part moment, all the planets to line up and everyone in the Middle East to get along peacefully, you’re never going to get any work done. It’s work. You have to get in there and grind it out and not be happy with the result most of the time.

MB If you do become comfortable, then you need to change it up a bit, and you have to stop it. You have to learn and grow on every painting, throughout your life. Even if it’s just repeating lessons, if you’re learning and you’re excited and getting it and you’re getting something new, then that’s perfect. If you’re just producing, I know a lot of artists down in Southern California that are production artists, that just keep producing and producing. They have people that work for them, and they might block in the painting, and they make a lot of money and it makes the galleries very happy because it’s a very kind of stable lifestyle. 

They kind of change with the seasons, you know if the colors change in people’s home they change too, or if shiny is in they change. They’re much more about marketing than painting and making a lot of money. For them, they’re happy with that, but I’m not happy with that at all. I’d love to make tons of money, who wouldn’t, but to able to have to take those steps …  it’s a very personal, private thing in my studio and painting and so it’s a very sacred space to me. I have collectors in here and people that buy and other artists, but still it’s a very private thing for me. So I can’t imagine having a factory with two employees turning out artwork, that isn’t my way.

JM And those blissful moments that you just mentioned, is that something that happened recently?

MB Taking the time to look?

JM Yeah, when did that happen?

MB Probably within the last year or so. Instead of standing there and making all physical changes, I make mental changes of what I’m doing. In my brain I can change this or that, make it to look like that and work off that in my brain, instead of physically changing the painting. So when I get to a resolved part when I need to see it, then I can stand up and do it. So in a sense I’ve been painting intellectually. And I skip some paint steps that I would be working out with material and work off that…then if it doesn’t work you have to find another way to tackle that problem.

JM How is it that you are able to convey atmosphere. Because I don’t see that in too many landscape painters?

Mark Bowles-Ethereal-Acrylic On Canvas-40" x 40"-2012

MB In certain parts, the atmosphere or the sky, I very deliberately try to find something that could be identified as me and not somebody else. I approach that and challenge myself with how do I come up with a new sky? One that I haven’t seen, although we’re all a collective of art history, but something I haven’t seen or is too common about the land or the sky. That’s one of the reasons my work is very minimal, I wanted to reduce everything down to the atmosphere and the earth. And that’s where I stay, with the horizon line and I’ve been developing that for years and just work with that concept. The variable you have between those two, by render and by color and by light, goes on forever, you can do it forever. Certainly I wasn’t going to touch Kondos’ Blue, which is almost a copyright/trademark thing, you can spot a Kondos Blue anywhere. 

He readily admits it that he is a western contemporary artist. So if I did blue, it wasn’t going to be that shade, so I got more and more into layering and washes through acrylic. Then I developed light particles and different textures to put the sky in and concepts along those lines. So that’s the area I explore when I want to do the sky. The reds and the oranges only live for a time, so it’s an emotionally feeling of a sunset, but not a direct one. So there are three essential parts and the horizon line, and from that I decided I wanted to move into a backdrop, a range, a California Mountain Range. So there’s development, it would be going back in a circle again, because these are similar to a painting I’d done years ago, but I wanted to go back and re-visit what I’ve learned over these years and put it back into that format. That’s like the loop that I do, I like to have a big bandwidth.

JM And before you started painting the landscape, you said you worked a lot with concrete.

MB Yeah a lot with my hands. That’s where it started for me, because I used to love clay, like all kids with mud and dirt. But I used to use my hands instead of brushes-  that went on for a long time. Yeah I used tar and would paint with that.

JM Wait, you used your hands to paint with tar???

MB And gloves don’t work, gloves just rip apart. And all sorts of chemicals I would buy without reading the labels…

JM Wow!

Louis Siegriest- Photo By Mimi Jacobs 1976

MB  And trowels! There was this one painter, Louis Siegriest and he did beautifully textured landscapes of the earth. He never got that much critical acclaim for what he did, but he was part of that Bay Area Movement along with Diebenkorn and everyone else. And his son, I took a class with him once, I used to take art classes outside of school a lot, a lot of his work was texture, gravel, so that made a huge impression on me because they were more emotional paintings. So that was interesting and he would frame some of the stuff with materials he found on the side of the road. It would be in a museum and you would see a piece of metal bent here and piece of wood there and that would make up the frame.  So you could tell he would think and re-think the materials and the tradition of what was normally being used.  

He would paint on doors, old doors because that was cheaper than canvas, and just frame them how he felt. So his work was incredibly good, and still is - there is a gallery that just opened up in the Bay Area that represents him. He did these Sausalito paintings, that didn’t really impress me that much, but his strictly abstract paintings I just loved them as a kid, somehow they just resonated with me.  So I started doing works on canvas and wood and it got to the point where I felt comfortable, I knew what I was doing, sold enough, and the response was good enough kind of thing, but then you have to shake things up, and say,” Ok I did this, now it’s onto something else.” So I got into painting, and I’ve gone through different modes, but what I came back to was something similar, the composition was similar to what I did 20 years ago. But I wanted to see what I came back to it with; it’s a different line quality, different color, different layering. All those years of painting now come back into a different focus. But I like it, and as long as I’m happy with it then it’s fine. You have to be genuine and honest with what you do, with the canvas and that comes across. When you’re honest with what you do and how you paint and how you present yourself, I think that’s part of the energy that people enjoy.

JM They’re interested in the story.

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