 Welcome to everybody who's joining us online to this evening's Paul Mellon Centre research seminar on Frank Bowling, the mother's house paintings. I'm Martin Moran, I'm head of grants, fellowships and networks at the Paul Mellon Centre and it's my pleasure to introduce to this evening's speakers. In a moment I'll be handing over to Grace Aniza Ali, who is a curator and assistant professor in the department of art and the department of art history's museum and cultural heritage studies program at the College of Fine Arts Florida State University, that's very long, very impressive. Grace is a curator scholar of contemporary art of the global south whose curatorial research practice examines the conceptual links and slippages at the nexus of art and migration and Ali, Grace specialises in art of the Caribbean diaspora with particular attention to her homeland Guyana and that's reflected in her extensive record of publication and curation including a book, liminal spaces, migration and women of the Guyanese diaspora and did her earlier research on Frank Bowling which I'm glad to say pleased to say was supported by Paul Mellon Centre curatorial research grant. Grace was also a participant in our British art network curatorial forum in New York and New Haven back in 2022 that's supported by the Paul Mellon Centre as well so we've got a bit of history so it's fantastic to have have you here this evening to hear your work. Now this evening is going to begin with Grace's talk and there's going to be a film clip and then a conversation with Grace and Ben Bowling who is professor of criminology and criminal justice at King's College London who's written a succession of books, violent racism, police in the Caribbean, global policing and the politics of the police which examine police accountability in the local national and transnational spheres alongside further academic roles, advisory and charity work which are detailed for online biography. Ben is also Frank Bowling's middle son and with his brother co-directs his father's studio so fantastic to have you here this evening so just to say the evening is yep firstly Grace's talk then a short clip and then from 5.30 to 6.30 or thereabouts there's going to be Ben and Grace in conversation and there'll be chance for Q&A questions from the floor but also if you're attending online you can submit questions online and they can be put to our speakers this evening as well so with that I think it's nothing more to do but welcome Grace to the stand. Thank you Martin it is it does feel very much like a full circle moment and so first things first just to share my gratitude to the wonderful team of the Paul Mellon Centre including Martin and Shria and Ella and Kathleen and Sarah Turner of course I couldn't do any of this work without the incredible generosity of the Bowling family especially Ben who I'm so grateful is sharing his time with us tonight and the Bowling Archive and the staff and the team from the Bowling Archive thank you all so much for your incredible time so I'm going to share for the next 25 minutes or so don't tie me on that but just how I am reading these mother's house paintings through a lens of migration so for the past six decades as most of us would agree Guy needs born British artist Sir Frank Bowling has been defined by his mastery of color abstraction and this is perhaps most largely exemplified by these wonderful critically acclaimed map paintings extraordinarily large-scale works with the stenciled outlines of maps of Guyana, South America and other land masses but before the map paintings and perhaps even as a precursor to them were a series of early figurative and abstract works informally regarded and this isn't a formal title but informally regarded by Bowling as the mother's house paintings although lesser exhibited and often timed lesser examined in scholarship they hold a very special place for the artist in his oevoir they're defined by a singular architectural motif this 1953 photograph of the house that Bowling grew up in and often returned to his mother's house in New Amsterdam British Guyana Bowling screen printed this image onto multiple blank canvases stockpiling them even taking them unfinished across international borders and this photograph of the three-story clapboard colonial house on main street would secure its place as an inescapable presence in his paintings and actually in many of their adjoining titles from this singular photograph the artist produced approximately 25 to 30 paintings and counting from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s and there's a little footnote I say and counting because Bowling often disappeared the photograph into these paintings and so we're still doing this wonderful detective work of deciphering the really the full extent of them which for a geek like me is really delicious work to sink your teeth in and for the studio I'm sure as well but first I'd like to show you a little montage of just the incredible range and breath in which the artist engaged with and treated the image of his mother's house through the paintings we see Bowling's actions of layering over painting tripling veiling stitching outlining even engulfing in fiery blazes and obscuring and erasing the image to the point where we can't see its material presence Bowling's varied artistic treatments often evoke a sense of displacement and scattering we see him meticulous in illuminating the house's aesthetic possibilities as well as its personal and political narratives we see him treat the image with both great care as well as violence in turn throughout the paintings the house appears as central in some as a silhouette as ghostly as faint as volatile looming fragile but always present and always formidable so how can a house just a house reflect migrations arcs its losses and its gains and this is the question that has really drawn me into these paintings I too am Guy and he's born as martin shared and when I go back to Georgetown Guyana my first ritual of return is always to visit the house where I grew up and spent my childhood and that house is now abandoned or I walk through the neighborhood and I'm encountering even more abandoned houses the colonial style house I grew up in on middle road no longer belongs to my family its present state of decay and disrepair conflicts with my memory of its vibrancy when I left 25 years ago it wasn't a beloved house nor was it hated but it held me and it gathered the people that I love houses provide a frame that bears this up right cerebrum in her really stunning memoir the yellow house about her own beloved New Orleans home in the American south which was swept away by Hurricane Katrina she continues that without that physical structure we are the house that bears itself up the house is witness to our lives so what would compel any of us because I know I'm not the only one that does this but what would compel any of us to reenact rituals of return like these to confront an architecture left behind these questions have drawn me to bowling's mother's house paintings not just curatorially but in a deeply personal way and as I began a close study of them I wondered about bowling's own rituals of return to this house physically artistically and psychically bowling talks often about how the house shows up in his dreams what was he to confronting in this architecture as broom writes here how did his mother's house bear him up to understand these paintings and to read them from a lens of migration we have to first examine the 1953 photograph itself what it reveals about the house about the town about new amsterdam and equally important about the person both the house and the paintings are named for bowling's mother critic mel gooding has called the photograph a motif that carried the elusive charge of a memory of home and similarly the lake curator oakwia wenzor deemed it a transitive image that marked the start of a look back to gainna and that it served as a talisman the photograph captures the view of the house on main street as bowling saw it in 1953 when he first left british gainna the photographer is unknown and who sent it to bowling is still shrouded in a bit of mystery it's useful here to inscribe the scholar tina camps compelling work on archival photographs and her book titled listening to images in her critical theory she urges us to move beyond simply looking at the image for what is visible and instead to actually listen to the image to listen for what is quiet in them for what is speaking to us in ways that might be invisible and so i invoke a sort of similar listening practice as i examine this 1953 image the photograph is a gateway to a liminal space it is both a symbol of new beginnings as well as departure and we have to think of it bowling is just a mere 19 years old here in 1953 he's leaving his homeland for the first time for london the photograph is thought to have been taken around june 2 coronation day of queen elizabeth the second and if you look at the image on the right in front of the house you can see the british flag the symbol of empire as it sways from a flagpole the photograph quietly telegraphs to us that bowling is leaving one version of empire for another the photograph is about a house it captures the grandiose architectural beauty of the many historical colonial wooden houses that still dominate gaianna's landscape and large capital letters painted on the awning declare the shop bowling's variety store which bowling's mother operated on the ground floor bountiful windows circle the second story allowing for a breeze and a reprieve from the heat the third story is sheltered with a high pitch triangular sink roof and in the background to the left a wind a wind swept palm tree looms above it its architectural features are a testament to the craftsmanship of skilled guiney's builders who were part of the country's amerindian and african and asian people and these local builders married the aesthetic leanings of colonial architects with their own expert understanding of what was needed to make a house a home in the region's tropical climate the photograph quietly tells us that this is a house to be proud of bowling often says the house was built up around him and indeed while it was being built his role was to be the night watchman guarding the house and the expensive building materials the photograph is about the woman standing in the open gate bowling's mother miss agatha crissie bowling miss agatha i call her miss agatha because in guiana we call her elders miss so pardon me miss agatha was a formidable figure not only in bowling's life but in the town of new amsterdam she purchased this land and built this house on it she started and operated the variety store which also functioned as her dress making business she took care of the town's destitute and it's vulnerable she was a skilled seamstress she's been called charismatic entrepreneurial a maker in her own right a designer of beautiful dresses and hats she sold saris and design and designated a young bowling to help measure and cut the fabric for the women who came into the shop and examining just the language of the titles to these paintings i find it telling what bowling did not call them outside of a few exceptions he did not assign titles such as the house on main street or the new amsterdam house or even as the awning declares the bowling variety store instead he repeatedly assigned the name a mother's house into their titles and even parenthetically bowling is also a poet and knowing his love for language i have to think this act of naming is in itself a poetic signaling to the main character in the image miss agatha bowling what the photograph quietly tells us is that as much as the house is central to the mother's house paintings so is bowling's mother equally central what the photograph doesn't show us however is that this woman standing in the gate was in rare company at the time she was the only black woman in the town of new amsterdam to own property and own her own business which she'll see shortly for new amsterdam was no small feat the photograph is about a place in 1953 bowling left british cayenne at a time rife with political unrest as the colony moved towards its long journey to independence from british colonial rule which actually wouldn't come some 13 years later in 1966 so all bowling had known was cayenne as colonized he spent the impressionable years of his adolescence here in new amsterdam cayenne is oldest town its support town on the burby's river 60 miles from the capital city of georgetown bowling has said of new amsterdam that it is the most important place and that it reappears all the time it was a town that was full of terror and at the same time it was marvelous it belonged to me the photograph is also as bowling notes about terror and that terror came in many forms it was the terror of racism of ethnic divisions of segregation and disenfranchisement under the iron fist of colonial rule it was the terrible terror of violence within the walls of his own home and it was the terror of entrenched poverty of what was and remains one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere so this collection of terrors is articulated in several works from the mother's house series in these paintings bowling is gesturing towards new amsterdam as a deeply tumultuous and vulnerable relationship and gesturing towards that terror and that colonial violence in the first work mother's house beware of the dog the facade of the house is more prominently visible than in other works it appears in the top half of the painting in a fiery blaze of red there's subtext of alarm and perhaps even violence an ominous creature the dog alluded to in the title dominates the lower half of the painting and along its right edge the words beware of the dog are stenciled it implores the viewer to interrogate a visceral danger haunting the work the aesthetic of alarm that house emblazoned in fiery red continues in other works as well so what we carry across borders what we pack among our sacred things especially if we are packing up an old life and departing for a new one is not only an intentional act but it can be quite revealing this 1953 photograph of the house found its way from british guiana to london 13 years later in 1966 as bowling shifts his practice to new yw'r city the image crossed international borders yet again albeit not in its original form while still in london bowling had started screen printing the mother's house photograph onto a stockpile of blank canvases and working on them in this photo we see bowling in his london studio in 1966 he's working on two of the earlier works from the series cover girl and old hike and you can see them propped up on the wall in the background still unfinished later that same year when bowling moved to new york what did he take with him that stash of canvases screen printed with mother's house perhaps he carried the image with him because of what was happening in british guiana that same year the country finally became independent of british rule but these canvases were certainly important to him and even without a studio bowling worked on them on the floor of the chelsea hotel in new yw'r city where he was staying when he first moved we live in the age of the image and at the moment i'm teaching a class for my graduate students called the migrant image and with them we're examining the mobility of the image meaning how the image moves through the world itself impacts the way that we're reading the image and i have to remind them that images crossing borders they seem to think it's an unremarkable thing in our 21st century digital world and i have to remind them that in times like 1953 this was an era before jpegs and tiff files when the tangible photograph stood among some of our most prized possessions so the migratory life of this little 1953 photograph was extraordinary in its material form it had traveled from british guiana to london to new yw'r city and its painting form it had traveled through the world essentially it too becomes a migrant image so when reading migration in these paintings we not only examine bowlings looking back to guiana but we also take into account his acts of return between when he first left british guiana and into the 1970s the period in which these paintings were made bowling returned to guiana multiple times what was calling back to him he was constantly trying to understand why this place remained in his psyche but in a way that wasn't already legible and what this place this house these relationships meant in his work so he returned to new amsterdam and mother's house three times between 1962 and 1970 which was as you can imagine very costly to do i was struck by what led to the first time bowling returned to british guiana and what he gave up to make that passage in 1962 he was offered a travel scholarship to roam and instead he requested the funds be used so he could return to guiana for the first time the second trip to guiana was in 1968 as part of this trip bowling and photographer tina transfer attempted to make a film about his life they shot 16 millimeter footage capturing the town of new amsterdam and scenes around the house on main street and the frank bowling archive has been able to restore this footage we'll be showing you a clip of that shortly but i want to use this 1968 return to reiterate this question again of what was calling back to bowling in these returns he was responding to increasing questions from his contemporaries in london and new york about his identity and his roots in guiana in a 1994 interview he remarked that the film was a way to quote bridge the gap between the guiana that had only the faintest inkling of and how my work had developed and so as he continued grappling with this 1953 photograph these multiple acts of return to guiana not only had an impact on individual works but they were also shifting the way that he was thinking about painting and in particular engaging with the visibility of the mother's house image as these paintings appeared more and more autobiographical to viewers the curiosity about the role of his identity in his work heightened but bowling was increasingly resistant to appeasing desires towards transparency and legibility in his work in the poetic intelligence he so masterfully wielded as i noted in the ways he titled these works he was calling for quote the right to opacity as articulated by another caribbean poet and theorist edward glissant a year after his 1970 trip to guiana now his third return bowling had a solo show at the whitney museum in new york he's quoted in that exhibition's catalog invoking in so many words i think that right to opacity saying that the most marvelous state for the painting is both it's giving a certain kind of information and also withholding it and that a most important aspect of a painter is to be involved in the ambiguous so what power does the unknowable the illegible the inarticulable have and how do we grapple with art that doesn't call to be understood that resists transparency and what is the migrants right to opacity this right to opacity the bowling was claiming showed up across treatments of erasing over printing layering whitening and particularly here ghosting the mother's house image bowling begins to combine the house with stenciled maps and silhouettes of guiana in south america evidence that the mother's house paintings were a significant gateway to the map paintings and in this first work mother's house over printed times three the house is replicated three times as one body it now resembles a glowing ghostlike ship floating in vast space that ghosting is repeated in the second work mother's house with south america by the time we get to the third work we are given a blazing dusty white shadowed outline of just the architectural shape of the house it almost all but disappears in all three of these works the mother's house image has some form of illegibility in one we sense its presence more so than we see it in others it's ambiguous but in all of them it is transcending into a more mythical object than a literal representation this works similarly palimpsest with full disclosure is my favorite of them i hear it's traveling next year in washington dc so i'll be there um the mother's house image is tripled again here and then faded and in some parts erased it becomes barely visible through clouds of red and green paint and an attempt at erasure that directly invokes the palimpsest referenced in its title and some straight traces of the structure still remain visible even after it has been eclipsed and erased and altered many times over the experience of migration is not always easily articulable is it is in itself full of contours and absences silences erasures losses and certainly opacities and through these works of the mother's house paintings we see that the more the curiosity heightened about bowling's migration story the more he reached for that right to opacity and finally in his looking back to gaianna via this photograph via his paintings and in his own multiple returns bowling understood something that i think is quite counterintuitive when we talk about migration we tend to think of migration as a one way street we center the leaving but the migration arc exists on a spectrum and it inscribes those who leave those who are left those who choose to remain those who return and those who simply cannot bowling understood that to examine the migrant self is not only to grapple with the act of leaving but it is to contend with one's relationship to who and what is left a house a mother a place as we'll hear from ben shortly mother's house no longer exists on main street and bowling has shared that his mother who passed away in 1988 actually never saw these paintings perhaps bowling and that migrant part of himself that he often tapped into intuited that a house which meant so much to him would be lost lost a time lost to a country caught up in forging an unknowable future lost to the inevitability of change and certainly lost to the fickleness of memory frank bowling's singular act to screen print the image of this house and send it out through the world was a way to keep it forever present to give it a future and like he once did as a young boy to remain its watchman thank you in the early years of my life we lived in pope street um and she bought about half the street on one side and turned one of the buildings into this people built a store front and which is where she started up her her um bowling's variety store bit um selling small items as well as um doing dress making and making hats and from pope street she moved to manus in john on the main street just opposite the catholic church immediately right opposite and built this big uh three story house with the the grandfather being the shop and the the places where all these machines for sort of sewing um it's been said and again i don't know how to it is she she that she had the first electrical sewing machine in the town she had about six singer sewing machines of all sorts and then she had all this pleating gear you know for pleating skirts and um embroidery machines and cutters what um now she she started this all up on her own on her own that her parents didn't have a no they didn't leave any money behind no so this is a very remarkable kind of story martin read your wonderful bio ben but my favorite part about your bio is you identify yourself as frank's middle son and i think that's very sweet and very touching but i thought we'd start with ben walked in and said to me you had a very important dream at three a.m. this morning about the house so i thought we would open up with that thank you thank you grace and fantastic presentation um i'm so pleased that this is being recorded so we can share it with dad and the rest of the family um so grace kindly showed me some questions that we would look at and um i've been ill i've just recovering from dengue fever and um so i didn't have much time to prepare but i did look at them before going to bed and at three o'clock in the morning i woke and i'm not sure whether it was a dream or a daydream or planning or whatever it was i had this thought that um there should be a play in four acts on the mother's house would all take place in the house or on the house and the first act is a building site and it's got the lumber and the the tools and the nails and the screws and so on and a sleep amongst the pile of lumber is an 11 year old boy this is 1945 second world war was just finished and uh Richard Sherwood and Franklin bowling known as Frankie is asleep in a makeshift sleeping bag and his job at 11 is to gather the site overnight to prevent people coming to steal the timber and the tools the second act is 1950 uh he's now called Richard Sherwood and Patrick Michael Aloysius Franklin bowling he's converted to Catholicism so this is 1950 16 years old and the conversion is a defiance of his father who's an Anglican and his mother his father's a policeman and he fears that Richard Sherwood and he's also called Richard Sherwood and he's going off the rails he's going to become a stray boy he's very defiant and in this the scene is still in the house uh in defiance of his father he's smashed every one of the display cases in the shop smashed them i think with a cricket bat smashed to pieces the smithereens by way of punishment his father has handcuffed him with his police handcuffs by the legs to the house to prevent him from running away and beats him with an unimaginable cruelty i'll spare you the details but in his interview with mel gooding he describes horrors that grace alluded to including a a deeply disturbing incident with a a sore left in the sun um his mother saves him and the saving is that she says if you'll be my huckster a kind of traveling salesman and you'll cycle from New Amsterdam to Georgetown and New Amsterdam to Skelton which is on the Surinam border on a carrier bike and take orders for saris and sell ribbons and lace any money that you make you can use for whatever purpose you wish and he said i'll i'll use that for my passage to england so from the age of about 16 till his departure in uh at the age of 19 he saved up the money and he flees the terror of the home and also arrives in britain um the third act is 1968 when he returns with Tina trying to make the film and finds this image um things have shifted clearly because now your the house is decorated with a guy in his flag and the the bunting is uh red yellow and green rather than the red white and blue and he finds his father a different kind of man um you know his his mother puts her hand on his shoulder he he's an elderly man sweeping and then the final act is 1989 his last visit to Guyana where he finds the house demolished his mother has died the previous year and Rachel and my stepmom recalls seeing a photograph of just the tiles the tiled floor so it kind of takes you almost like full circle um from a building site to another building site and um i have no idea i can't write a play but it struck me that these episodes and grace also alluded to them tell us something about what lies behind the paintings what lies behind the image of the house what it means for him as an artist what his journey what his his migratory journeys from Guyana to London or from London to New York back again what kinds of meanings are left the residues of them um that what starts out as a very stark and striking kind of polarized image turns into something largely erased and indistinct and some of the very later the the the latest work says i mean Hathif is fantastic um that works like um raining down south where you can just barely make out the house it's there with other stencils stencils of South America and Guyana and mother's house is there but it's almost completely erased but not completely the residues remain and when grace visited a few nights ago and talked to him you can i think we could tell that the the feeling about the place and about his mother those residues they remain in his psyche today do you recall when you first started hearing about not just the house and what it meant to your father but started really seeing or hearing about his use of that image in the in the paintings has he always talked about it to his family or is this something that you learned of later i guess it for me it starts with the paintings um cover girl for me is one of the most striking works i mean we'll talk a little bit about the sort of legacy of this later on but for me cover girl is well it's an iconic painting it has the Japanese model figured in the centre of the work um it was a an observer magazine cover 1966 and mother's house is there behind this so they're sort of cosmopolitan pop art there's you know it kind of feels a bit war warholish or maybe peat Blake but there in the background is this is this house so i think that's probably where it starts for me intrigued by the house and i asked him about it and he talked about you know the house that he grew up in that was built around him um and then i suppose uh the um Mel Gooding's interviews so uh Mel Gooding who died a couple of years ago now did the first monograph on dad's work but he interviewed him over more than 20 hours for the British Library and you can hear the like the tapes on you can hear the tapes online and we have the transcript so reading about the house and those i suppose i mean i'm a bit geeky like you intrigued by what that house meant and then seeing its repetition in the works is sort of fascinating and in the early 1990s i got to know my cousin Chetwind who's named for Frank's youngest brother uh middle middle brother Chet um talking with him about his experiences of growing up um i think not in the house but nearby and connecting and probably also the my first visit to Guyana um in 2004 so but i think it starts actually strangely with the paintings and it's an iconic image but it's also got something to do with my grandmother who i never met so i guess those are the the associations for me so that is a perfect segue to the next question i'm always struck when there is scholarship around the mother's house how little Miss Agatha Bowling is actually talked about and i think we need to correct that a bit because i do think these paintings are an homage to his mother as much it is it is to the house how did you first encounter the the largeness of Agatha Bowling and if you can share with them also the portrait that you have in your home of her yeah well i think dad he did always speak about her and with great affection and the interviews with Mel Gooding are really tremendous in this regard it begins there really he thinks that he was her favorite child the eldest son um and he was born with a call which is a you know born with inside the amniotic sack so it's a strange um phenomenon but taken in many cultures as a mark of somebody who will achieve some kind of greatness and also the ability to see the future so um he always talked about uh how she would take him to seances as an infant not an infant but as a preteen anyway um where he was he it was something to do with rain water a fresh egg and i don't exactly know what they would do but he would somehow look at these things in a sort of shaman like way and read the future people would ask you know what was going to happen to them next and he was able to do that until until puberty various other strange rituals that were in there it's kind of got to do with obia and you know um sort of i guess african religions and spirituality and he was very precious to her but she was also a um a disciplinarian an anglican i think both mother and father beat him um and i think yes this larger than life figure who was his businesswoman who had started a shop in another street and then built this house and had created a kind of property empire by the time that she passed away but not a trusting woman i think that she she always felt that i mean he talked about it the night the idea that maybe he would come back and run the store i think in the 50s when he had was doing his national service she expected him to to go shopping for spare parts for the singer sewing machines and he remembers going down brick lane and and buying zips and buttons and lays to send back um actually in a way it's where his story as a as an artist begins because in walking back from brick lane with all these products he um he happened across the white chapel gallery and um and went in and it was a famous exhibition called something like this is tomorrow and uh he said he had no idea that this stuff typography and architecture and painting and drawing could be art about 1955 or thereabouts um so i think you know a difficult relationship with his parents um he said that recently i think he said to mel he'd never he remember he can't remember having a conversation with his father and when he left in 53 he didn't say goodbye to him but there was this kind of that continued connection with his mother i think that i mean as you know now that there's a certain amount of correspondence very very beautiful hand written mail mail letters um from his father to him and his mother not when they're from his mother to him and his brother and sister so i think that connection even though i mean i'm one of three sons or with different mums not exactly a family man uh at least not from the mother's point of view but somehow he managed to um break the cycle um you mentioned terror and the violence so yes i'm sad that i didn't ever meet her um my last visit was in 2019 i went with my youngest son Frederick um and we did we went looking for her grave um and in Guyana because everything is what is below sea level um the the graves are all like tombs that are elevated and we found the record of her of her burial unfortunately the grave digger at the time was not a very good record keeper and didn't record the plot number the the current grave digger was very um angry about and um critical of his predecessor so it's a huge space and we found that there was really no way to to go and find this space which is a source of sadness so i think that i didn't ever meet my grandmother or my grandfather who's a source to me and yet she still feels quite present in the photographs and i have a a um a print i think it's an etching um called mother's mother approaching 60 which is this fantastic photograph 68 photograph um where frank my dad's drawn a circle around she's got a very round face and drawn this circle um the circle in the square is a significant motif for him in his artwork and she's got this sort of kind of bitific smile um and she's um on the wall in our flat and so when i'm lying on the sofa of an evening my glass of soda water i can sort of i can sit and look at her and now i've i was approaching 60 i'm no longer approaching um but i felt like a sort of connection there be there and ben of course we wish we had another ending to the story of this house what happened to the house on main street i don't really know exactly it was demolished um the house next door that you can see just off to the left is still standing the catholic church opposite is still standing um i would say probably about one in three of the original 50s houses are still standing um i think that what happened was that so richard sheridan senior died first in the end of the 70s and agatha elizabeth she's called Chrissy by the way because she was born on christmas day and was known but to everybody as Chrissy um she died in uh 1988 just before dabb went and exhibited his paintings for the first time in 1989 um together with denis de carries um guineys painter still working uh rather excellent painter um and by the time he arrived so within a year of her passing the house was already demolished um it was replaced with a similar looking but concrete building which is quite common in in guine there's um i think my visits there have been very educative and i think that perhaps it's just like tangent where effort has been put into restoring these buildings they've been absolutely fantastic the main cathedral in um in georgetown has recently been restored it's the it's the largest wooden cathedral church anywhere in the world it's an extraordinary with wooden flying buttresses it's a an extraordinary place and i am i came across a building which i didn't know what it was and it was only through um seeing an artwork by Hugh lock um who's here this evening um of the masonic lodge in New Amsterdam um in Hugh's version it's um surrounded by water but that's been restored and is an extraordinary building and um i don't know whether Compton is here this evening but Compton Davis has written a fantastic book um on the the wooden houses of of of Guyana um so sadly there is a house on the I mean there is a house on the site but sadly it's not the original house I mean in my imagining I imagine Agatha Elizabeth um rather lonely not really trusting of her youngest son who stayed behind and her daughter-in-law um Frank talks about how burglas came into the house while she was still in the house and stole things and they owed back taxes and I think they nearly lost the house entirely and I imagine her as an elderly lady uh weakening rather alone um and that once you passed the house probably was you see the more cross Guyana these beautiful beautiful colonial houses with fretwork and but they're they're they are they're decaying and collapsing it's a very very humid environment it's very hot the wood if treated and looked after and shepherded um will last but there's a sort of a decaying there um a kind of an irony of Guyana I think it's an extraordinary place incredible people that Guyani's diaspora is you know huge and a lot of influential people um a lot of beauty a lot of incredible natural resources but also a lot of um decrepitude and you know all kinds of sort of social problems and you know problems in maintaining the infrastructure um so I mean I've stayed in the house on the site and it's you know it's still you know you still have the view out the Catholic Church the houses next door I think that palm tree or the palm tree you know like it is still there it still feels like um I grew up in Worcestershire so it's not you know born in London grew up in Worcestershire so it's not kind of it's a kind of fictitious home there's there was there was a home-like quality to it even though I grew up you know in England I knew nothing about Guyana until you know I was in my 40s really I didn't ever visit until I was in my 40s so these houses were uh tucked away for a long time but in the last eight years or so they've had a really lovely curatorial visibility in Okwya Wenzher's exhibition at House de Kunst Mapamundi I think four Okwya Wenzher it selected four of the mother's house paintings for that exhibition and then here at the Tate in the 2019 show there were about seven of them there and then now in the States recently just finished touring the Frank Bowling America's exhibition had a lovely nine of them gathered together so it's really lovely to see them little by little coming together and hopefully we're working on it to reunite all of them um together what does it mean for you for the studio for your father to see this resurgence of interest and curatorial visibility of these paintings that were really stored away and tucked away for a long time well it's joyous um in a way it's sort of it reflects dance career really I mean he didn't have representation in the UK until sometime in the 2000s so you know most of his career he didn't have a commercial gallery representation he barely sold any paintings in England um I mean he did well in the early 60s left for New York in the mid 60s disappointed by how England was treating him and you know made a made a living in the USA but when he returned to London in 1975 you know the 70s and the 80s and the 90s it was tough 70s 80s in particular nobody was looking at his work nobody was interested in his work at all these enormous map paintings that people swoon over people would you know look at them and you know 21 feet wide paintings they kind of go oh yeah yeah waves um so the fact that that his career has taken this turn in his 80s really he'll be 90 later this month um he's a source of great joy obviously the the success of the map paintings as a as a series is fantastic um probably a little boring now after you know because it's that sort of so um no they're beautiful paintings but it's kind of become so repetitious so I think that it's wonderful that curators um collectors others particularly students um are engaging with different bodies of work and I I feel that the mother's house series is I mean there's the very early works the early figurative works and the idea of the mother's houses are kind of transitional motif um I could get a bit psychoanalytic there but it it marks it marks it's one of the markers of the transition from from figuration to abstraction and allows particularly as you see that the as you see the image disappearing and then eventually by you know by the time of Hafif 1969 1970 all figurative elements have disappeared and then it's this pure colour from then on except for a return in the 1990s and early 2000s to the mother's house I don't we know the story but the lines behind those but he he's he reworked some of those and they are they're called things like mothershouse.com always playful in the title so it's it's a great joy and the idea of an exhibition you know in a museum of as many of the series as can be assembled from the very stark you know there's a there's a couple of works on paper that are just the stencil of the of the house through to the to the very late ones and to see that transition and to see them in repetition in the way you might see warhols marillans or jackies and also to do as you've been doing to dig into the aesthetic I mean the geometry of what's going on in there and the and the the collage and the metistage and all the stuff that's going on in those works and then they're they gradually erasure I think it's I think it's going to be a great show with a with a fantastic book and you know I hope dad will see it come to fruition and I think that it's a it's a tremendous project and you also mentioned the detective element of it I mean I'm people are encouraging me to see the links between criminology and artistry because I'm an artistry dunce I mean I've never this is my first visit to this incredible place today you know I know about only through my mother's work my father's work so I'm you know I need artistry 101 but to to find as we have done like there's mothers there it is and there is the most iconic image but some of the works also have some of the other mother's house photographs in there and of course his mother herself her appearance she appears her face appears and my brother's appear so the way that the family and the family home appear it's um it's it's very moving and very they're for me they're very they're very beautiful they're aesthetically very pleasing um but it's also a deeply emotional kind of journey looking at these works so I really appreciate what you've done in bringing them to light thank you this is a question from Carmen B but it's a comment in a in a question um I'm going to read it as is so I'm going to be Carmen B for the purposes of reading this out hi Ben my father is Guy and he's born in 1938 and his family had a big house on is it Lamarhaar Street in Georgetown which hosted lots of dramatics and musical shows as his granduncle was Masalil Pollard the great sitar player of Guyana I wanted to ask if there are any plans for a Sir Frank Bowling Museum in Guyana so it's kind of picking up this question of legacy and remembering um I am also an artist and your father's art is brilliant well that's thank you so much that's absolutely wonderful um most appreciated um and I didn't know about the great sitar player of Guyana so that's um a new line of inquiry I think um Frank Bowling Museum well uh that's a big undertaking I mean so I've been working with my brother for the last five years um in working to develop to protect and preserve the the artworks themselves the archive the studio in Peacot Lake Peacot yard in in in Southwch um where that's worked for the last 40 years that that's our first priority um I'm beginning we are beginning to imagine as a studio what a you know a studio museum might look like so the studio itself is very you know interesting beautiful and we do have we do host visits we had a group from the court old yesterday which was wonderful and we have you know ideas about how we might um develop um sort of public education um in relation to the work and plans for you know Frank Bowling Foundation a museum in Guyana is would be in a massive undertaking um um I can see the members of the studio team in the audience going oh no not yet um it's a fantastic idea and I really appreciate the suggestion uh I'm going to put it on the yeah you know possible mad ideas that you might have before breakfast um that may be realizable in the decades to come I really appreciate the suggestion thank you so any questions or comments from the room I mean there's a there is a follow on question which is um what museums are there in Guyana anyway in terms of art museums um and because there's a question here from Katie Robson which is um thank you for a wonderful talk I'm going to put that in where are the works located are the in public private collections so there's a kind of two-part thing really about you know what's existing museums in Guyana like as there is a chance representation but also where the works are now so there's a national museum art museum called Castellani House which does have a uh Pisces it's a very heavily built up 80s work um which I've seen and is very beautiful um Guyana and it's in a it's in a and it's in a beautiful uh old wooden house in in Georgetown very close to the botanical gardens and zoo botanical gardens worth definitely worth a visit there's a zoo not so much um but you know it's a country with sort of 90 humidity often um on the edge of the rainforest very very hot conserved as nightmare um I mean I think Castellani House it does host exhibitions it's as vibrant as it is it can be it's uh you know Guyana is an as I said it's an incredible place I think superlative natural resources gold bauxite timber you know tremendous human resources um but um you know under resourced without any doubt Castellani House I think it needs it needs support as to where the um the works are that's a good question um so dad's work is in about 50 public collections worldwide mostly in the USA and the UK not so much in Europe although it's beginning to happen um the mother's house works are I would say I can think of a couple that are in public collections mostly particularly the very early ones are mostly in private collections um and I don't know where they are I was told by a gallerist probably five years ago it's a terribly bad idea for artists to know where their paintings are um so we're working on that we are you know we have a research team who are you know increasingly works are coming collectors are coming to the studio to say I've got this painting can you tell me a bit about it but the the mother's house works I think probably what do we think that's about 25 or 30 paintings I would say we that we know of I would say knowing for sure we probably know for sure where maybe half or maybe 20 of them are and I would know for sure maybe 15 and there's a few others that we know who knows even if we don't know ourselves and we have some lines of inquiry for the detectives the art detectives to get out there and a few a few are you know with the family and in the inventory so I think sadly the clock is against but I think there's a there's a question thank you so much there may be one more after that really really fascinating um I wanted if you could talk a bit more about the wider architectures and infrastructures in Guyana I think when you use a phrase like colonial architecture for many people in part because it's so broad it evokes kind of images of the sort of magnificent seven perhaps in Trinidad and these very overtly European looking architectures and I was really struck I saw the Frank Bowling painting as part of entangled pasts and there's another work in that exhibition that reimagines the magnificent seven for instance in in wood and I was wondering if you could talk a bit more about like the particular kinds of infrastructures architectures in Guyana I will point you to the person that has done and Ben mentioned him Compton Davis has done the only book so far on the history of these houses in Guyana and it's called the wooden houses of the wooden houses of Guyana I believe that's the title so he's the expert on it and I would send you his way it's a beautiful beautifully shot beautifully stunning photographs of the houses that are still in Guyana and the ones that are in disrepair as well and even in disrepair I think they're still stunning and gorgeous but he also is an architect so he goes into the architectural history and how Guyani's builders were learning from the British to also combine both of these different ways of thinking about the home into one singular architecture okay I think one more question here on the front row thanks wonderful talk thanks my question is about just looking at this house um who did Frank grow up with how was that house divided was it you know what was the family there like and then a question about migration and when he came here do we know where he lived there in you know in terms of houses and movements and people thank you so the ground floor so one of the interesting things about the um so the ground floor is the shop at the front this is all the variety store and you can see the when you see the footage there was the the clip actually is on instagram if you're interested you can see the hats and you can see into the house the back kitchen um uh where there's sort of living spaces kitchen um along this footage from 68 there's this tremendous film of Agatha Elizabeth bringing the beggars from the street into the house and where where dad would be asked to wash their hands and feet um and then would they be fed and it's always struck me as a kind of like almost fantastical story but to see the film of it it's absolutely it's it's astonishing and there's another series of works the beggar paintings um first floor is um big living room and there are some interior photographs um lots of plants you kept you know tropical plants indoors and then bedrooms and then I think it's notable in the 1953 photograph that the upper floor doesn't have windows there's no there's no jalews there's no shutters so but by 68 um so these would have been bedrooms um dad was one of four so um Maisie my auntie Maisie who I met who was wonderful uh elder sister then Frankie and then Chetwyn to so Maisie left to go to LA to be a nurse uh my uncle Chet his next brother down went to Puerto Rico to become a nurse and then trained as a doctor and did community medicine his entire career in Philadelphia and then Watson my uncle Watson stayed in in in New Amsterdam sadly died um of COVID in 2020 and his his wife Camille died just a little bit before that and then briefly um dad's journey so he arrives in England in 1953 stays with an uncle and then joins the RAF serves his national service in the RAF and then um was befriended by artists Keith Critchlow was one particular man a medic in the RAF who you know he sort of couchsurfed I think then to the Royal College 62 and um and then he's I guess he's been living in Pimlico where he still lives today um since the sort of he lived in um in Clapham they clapham common in the late 50s early 60s and then moved to Pimlico and he's lived in Pimlico apart from the periods of being in New York ever since where he is right now and he's still working um I've still got um was in the studio today with him his painting is in the studio three times a week he's just made his massive painting um three meters tall and seven meters across which um will be um on on display uh for his 90th at um housingworth Savile Row I think from you know from next week 22nd but the isn't it something like the 14th that it actually begins it's open so to be on for a month just these two very very large works one recently made it he um extremely ambitious we were talking about collage last night I went into the studio today and he's like where's that where's all that that bag of old bits of African fabric do this and get this and so he's he's on collage again so um yeah he's uh he's remains an extremely ambitious man even at the age of 90 along the way it continue such fantastic conversation we're going to squeeze in one more question um from online because I think there'll be the chance for those of you here in Bedford Square to continue the conversation next door um and this is from uh Jason Cyrus hi Grayson Ben is Jason Cyrus apologize I could not be there um this evening uh as planned thank you for a superb representation that uh as much illuminating as it was was also deeply moving as someone born and raised in Guyana I found myself becoming quite emotional at many points how might we take hapsai how might these paintings and Frank's work overall help to galvanize interest amongst the guy needs diaspora like myself in taking an active role in preserving and investing in our heritage I thought a good question to kind of a big one but a good question to end on it's a cracking question and I get coming down isn't it coming right back at you really someone needs to do it um for sure I think I think Compton Compton Davis' book and he's you know I think there's there's an architectural actually there is a Facebook group that shares information about the um about the houses and seeks to preserve them and as I said the the main cathedral has been completely restored um so I guess I mean there are also influential people you know quite a lot of British politicians are of Guyana's heritage David Lambie um I feel a letter writing campaign coming up um so yeah Grace um thank you Jason for a question that should take us a few hours to answer I think the way I would respond to that for me it's it's a scholarship it's a study of this work that's a part of galvanizing our community and I'll share with you all you know for the researchers in the room to do this work on these particular paintings I'm often in the footnotes I'm living in the footnotes so much about the house and Frank's mom and about New Amsterdam isn't in the main pages it's in the footnotes and so we've got to get it out of the footnotes first of all and into the main narrative of understanding these paintings and so I think there is a really wonderful opportunity to create and develop new exciting scholarship and that's the role I think curators like me can play and researchers like me can play is just really taking on the scholarship part of it okay was that I think we do need to um close the formal part of this evening um bring that to a to an end um it's been I'm sure everybody will agree online and in the room such an amazing evening to hear scholarship thoughtful reflection but also memory and life kind of intertwined so so richly so I'm sure you will join me in thanking Grace and Ben for their presentations