About Andrew Bowers

Through the Quiet Divides series, I explore the boundaries and structural elements that shape our experience of landscape—walls, paths, waterways, tree lines and horizons. Inspired by places across Yorkshire and other personally encountered landscapes, I use acrylic, mixed media and layered surfaces to simplify and reconstruct real locations, revealing their underlying structure, atmosphere and sense of place. My work moves between observation and abstraction. Composition provides the initial structure, but each painting develops through expressive colour, visible marks, partial removal and the reappearance of earlier layers. I am interested not simply in recording a landscape, but in what remains after it has been experienced: fragments of colour, shifts of light, remembered forms and emotional presence.

Andrew Bowers’ practice has developed through sustained study of composition, colour, tonal structure and the relationship between representation and abstraction. His first extended formal training in acrylic painting was with Nina Hunter at Saltaire Art Gallery & School. Further study with Andrew Kinmont, David Mankin, Lewis Noble, Gabriel Lipper, Robert Dutton, Kasia Clarke, Marina Teding van Berkhout and Rosso Emerald Crimson has broadened his approach to glazing, collage, expressive mark-making and layered surfaces. These influences have helped him move beyond the literal description of a subject while retaining a strong underlying structure. Landscape remains central to his established practice, informed by walking, observation and the varied character of Yorkshire. Alongside this work, Bowers also explores portraiture and contemporary abstraction, using colour, texture and gesture to investigate identity, mood and presence. Across these strands, his development has been guided by a continuing tension between control and improvisation: composition establishes the framework, while the physical process of painting allows images to change, simplify and acquire their own atmosphere.