Katherine Bowling | Forecast

Bowling’s paintings are inspired by the tradition of the Hudson River School of the 19th century. Utilizing quiet symbolism, Bowling infuses a Romanticist aesthetic into the details of each scene, with the paintings in this series moving between the observed landscape and an interior one. Fields, trees, fences, roads, and solitary houses create places that feel both familiar and slightly elusive. For Bowling, many of these works are inspired by the Hudson Valley area where she lives and memories of her childhood growing up in Virginia. Houses appear quietly within these landscapes, some painted and some collaged, partially hidden by trees or suspended in open fields. In her piece, Neighbors, two houses are present, peaking through the branches of trees, almost blending into the surrounding wooded environment. Green dominates—enclosing while also luminous—and light moves through the painting, leading the eye into spaces that remain just out of reach. The small abstract paintings turn this series inward. Circles, grids, repeated marks, and concentrated fields of color abandon recognizable landscape while retaining its emotional structure. Shapes seem to hover, open, contain, or radiate. Seen alongside the larger paintings, they feel less like departures from nature than distillations of it—small internal landscapes where color and form carry what the larger paintings locate in fields, trees, houses, and light. Together, the works move continuously between outside and inside, recognition and abstraction, distance and intimacy. The landscape becomes not simply a place that is seen, but a place filtered through memory, sensation, and imagination. What begins with looking outward ultimately becomes another way of looking within. Katherine Bowling was born in Washington, DC and earned her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978. She has been exhibiting her work since the early 1980s in New York City and throughout the United States. Bowling has received numerous awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1991. Her work is featured in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; and the Fisher Landau Center, NY, among others.