Alumni Month Show: Sally Bowring
Showing through April.
In honor of Reunion Weekend April 7-9 and Alumni Month, April, the Big Screen features the work of alumna Sally Bowring (M.F.A., ’83). She teaches painting at Virginia Commonwealth University and is an active and engaged artist in metro Richmond. (Image: April Winds)
Her many notable accomplishments include being a recipient 
of the Virginia Museum of Fine Art Professional fellowships and the Theresa Pollak Visual Arts Award 2003-2004. She also has been granted four fellowships to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. In 2007, Bowring was invited as guest instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University, Qatar. Bowring served as staff and Commissioner as well as Chair of the Public Art Commission for 12 years. Most recently, she completed three years as vice chair of the Fellows Council of the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Bowring is a long-standing emeritus member of 1708 Gallery and serves on the Advisory Board for Studio 23.
Her artwork has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally.
Her current artist’s statement
“My work arrives through a series of processes that mimic some of the behavior of domesticity from cleaning the kitchen counters to gardening, through planning, arranging and spraying (and in some cases, masking, stenciling, digging back or exposing). My paintings are created by using various acrylic solvents – sprayed – from low-tech plastic spray bottles as well as layers of metallic enamels and acrylic paints
Combining intuitive decisions with a formal structure built with veils of color created from marks and stenciled forms – the paintings reference gardens, wallpaper, table cloths, natural patterns and textiles.
Interiors next to exteriors and geometry next to the organic.
The use of color in my paintings plays a range from atmospheric to saturation. The resulting abstract paintings reference a concern for order, selection and beauty. The work alludes to cycles, unpredictability, things seen and hidden and the repetition of life.”
Categories Alumni Work, Community