Frank Bowling

Copying the work of Frank Bowling

(Case-study II of Ana Teles’ research project | 2016/21)

In April 2018, I contacted Frank Bowling to ask if I could copy his work. Bowling and Rachel Scott, his wife, were both keen that I make a copy of his “lost painting”, Lent. When we met, he gave me two images of the painting: one in darker tones and the other in more saturated colours with vibrant reds, which had been digitally edited to match his memory.

Lent (1963) was one of Bowling’s most treasured paintings and belonged to his figurative and expressionist period, a time when his concerns with political, social, and personal issues were more evidently depicted in his work. Lent is a personal response on the disasters of war, using images drawn from newspaper reports of contemporary events, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis, alongside images drawn from traditional representations of Catholicism.