Women in Art - Raising the Bar
15 FEBRUARY 2022 - 08 MARCH 2022
Timed Auction
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31. Day Bowman
Study 2 Plashy Place Series.
Study 2 Plashy Place Series.
Oil, charcoal and conte on canvas
45 cm x 50 cm x 4 cm
2019
Signed verso
My childhood days were spent in the unassuming Somerset town of Minehead, and it is the landscape of that post-industrial beach town that forms the bedrock for much of my painting.
In this series of paintings I find that the canvases echo the marks, lines and shapes that we made in the wet, grey sand of my home town beach: thus the canvas becomes the beach that acted as the canvas of my child-hood.
Acting as our playground the beach provided a canvas for mark-making, inscribing names, hop-scotch, drawing out goal posts or strange messages to the gods. A concrete paddling pool, a sea wall built high and colourful windbreaks that doubled up as modesty screens all jostled for space and recognition; this was a place where fortifications were swept away by the tide and where gritty tea was drunk from plastic cups.
And as the seasons changed I became aware of how a place full of noise and laughter, people and sunshine became one of out-of-season emptiness; the windswept promenades, ripped hoardings and harsh winds had transformed our beach, only the tides and the lugworm castles were a constant.
It is this abandon of play that WB Yeats’ The who Dreamt of Faeryland, who, careworn with the fears and concerns of adulthood, observes the humble lugworm rising to the surface, singing of higher places and golden skies …
It is these watery Plashy Places that I return to in these works.
ESTIMATE
£450 - 800
This auction has now ended
Notes
Accolades (e.g. education, exhibitions and awards)
A graduate of the Chelsea School of Art, London, her work is characterised by chaotic mark-making and gestural brushstrokes. Much of her work harbours subtle political undertones, pertaining to a wave of environmental decay, industrial waste and intolerance.
AWARDS AND COLLECTIONS
In the past twelve months her work has gained first prize in the Anima Mundi International Painting Prize and exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2019; this was quickly followed by being awarded first prize in the Bath Arts Open 2019 and first prize for the inaugural Wales Contemporary 2019. Most recently Day was awarded the Winsor & Newton Prize 2020 by the Royal Institute for Painters in Watercolours.
Tearing up the Rule Book, a solo international exhibition at Westminster Reference Library London and Atelier Melusine France was praised by critics and bloggers at its London showing in March 2019. In 2012 she was commissioned to produce a series of giant hoardings for Weymouth Railway Station, host town to the Olympic Sailing and Paralympic Sailing events.
Day’s 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, the Priseman Seabrook Collection and the Yantai Art Museum Collection China
