Day Bowman

I have been thinking on how we read the landscape – the rural rather than the urban – and the contrasts to be found topographically region by region. In the West Country, near to where I grew up in the Brendon Hills, there are landscapes of deep valleys and steep hills. The land rises up before you allowing very little sky in the composition. In comparison, a journey recently made to Barton-upon-Humber displayed fields laid out like a tablecloth with deep perspective, vanishing points and vast skies. 
The commonality of both landscapes is that the land has been parcelled up into fields of varying sizes for crops, grazing and much else, along with woods, waterways and roads. 
There is a sentimentality promulgated about this bucolic landscape but two hundred years ago the land did not resemble the present-day patchwork quilt of shape and colour that we see today. 
With the introduction of The Enclosure Acts, the peasant populations were forbidden the right to use the vast and open common lands which led to a mass movement from the shires to the cities; and this, over time, brought about a complete change in the landscapes of Britain.
But change is the nature of progress, and it seems that these fields and woods and waterways are already being integrated into ever larger prairielands. Small farms are being sold off to city folk who are the same people amassing great tracts of lands as investment. And so, curiously, we shall see a more open landscape of two hundred years ago but, sadly, not one for the commoners.

Biography
A graduate of the Chelsea School of Art and London University, her painting is characterised by chaotic mark-making and gestural brushstrokes.
Bowman’s work has been shown nationally and internationally including Art First London; Karin Sanders Fine Art New York; The Bluecoat Liverpool; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition London; a four-museum tour of China with Contemporary British Painting 2017; commissioned to produce a series of giant hoardings for Olympic and Paralympic Sailing events in 2012.
Awards include: First Prize in the Anima Mundi International Painting Prize and exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2019; First Prize Bath Arts Open 2019; First Prize for the inaugural Wales Contemporary 2019; Winner of the Royal Institute for Painters in Watercolours Winsor & Newton Prize 2020. 
Her work is held in numerous private and public collections worldwide including Hilton Hotel Group; British Dental Association; Dorset County Hospital, St. Vincent and Grenadines Govt. Art Collection.