At ninety-one, Frank Bowling is still breaking new ground. This year alone, the leading abstract painter opened his debut solo exhibition in France, and now, he is exhibiting in Brazil, South America — the continent of his birth — for the first time. For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Not All Travellers Walk Roads – Of Humanity as Practice, Bowling presents twenty-five paintings spanning five decades of work in response to the biennial’s central metaphor of the estuary — a symbol of the convergence of philosophies, mythologies, and landscapes. On a hot summer’s afternoon, art historian Melissa Baksh caught up with the artist to discuss the allure of São Paulo, serendipitous chance happenings, and how Guyana — with its wild waters and luscious terrain — is a constant, both in his work and his dreams.
From my earliest memories, I was always this uncontrollable little boy — this hyperactive kid who liked doing dangerous things, like escaping into the bush, and learning to swim in the creeks and ponds. Bartica, the small town where I was born, is right up in the bush, in the interior. It’s at the edge of the Amazon rainforest, where the Essequibo and the Cuyuni, the Mazaruni and the Potaro meet. The source of these rivers is in the interior of the continent, and they thread through the rainforest and savannahs of Brazil and Guyana until they meet the Atlantic. I’ve always felt connected to the place, and I’ve realised in recent years that the scene that confronts you the moment you open your eyes when you first come into the world stays with you, and influences how you see everything around you for the rest of your life.
Guyana is a unique place. It’s the only English-speaking country in South America, with this incredible mix of Black, East Indian, Amerindian, Portuguese, and Chinese populations. It culturally belongs to the Caribbean, and yet, in terms of its physical location and terrain, it’s very much part of the continent. I guess there has always been something romantic about being South American as well as a West Indian, Caribbean person. I always thought of the boundaries between Guyana and Brazil as being arbitrary colonial conventions, and that the countries in that corner of the world were part of a larger geographic terrain.
Most people don’t know where in the world Guyana is, or anything much else about it. Working with maps — whether South America or Guyana — served a useful purpose for me artistically. At various points in my career, most obviously in the sixties and seventies, the map was really important. But by 1973, I was trying to cancel out the map shapes in my work, marking the transition of my practice towards complete abstraction. In fact, making paintings with map stencils brought back embarrassing childhood memories when one of the tasks we had in primary school was to be able to draw the map of Guyana freehand! It was something I had struggled with, and I only got over it once the artist Larry Rivers showed me how to use the epidiascope to get the drawing right.
The map of South America arrived in my work quite by accident. Around 1966, I was working on the floor of the Hotel Chelsea in New York. I would apply paint in ways that followed the sun as it moved across the room, and I noticed that the way the shadow fell over the canvas suggested a map of South America. This was at a time when I was moving away from the figurative work of the early part of my career, and I found that the stencil and silk screens provided me with something to hold onto in the work as the paint spread and bled over the canvas. So, the map started as something quite by chance, but here it is, still doing something for me all these years later.
When I first looked at the concept for the biennial, and read all these ideas about the estuary — its muddy, silty existence — and the life that’s lived by the mangroves where salt and fresh water meet, I felt totally in tune with it. It sounded like my work, my environment. I’ve lived my life right next to rivers, going back to those wide rivers in Guyana that spill into the ocean. I guess you could call my work estuarine; the painting literally emerges from the mud and alluvium of paint matter as the water carries it over the surface.
From early on, the conversation turned to making new works, and there were some coincidences that led to what I eventually produced. It happened that the silk screen of South America that I had made in 1968 in the textiles department at Camberwell College of Arts was brought back from being restored. When we looked at it, one of my sons noticed that among the place names on the map, the only one written out in full was São Paulo. When they asked me why, I told them that it is a place that I dreamed of visiting since I was a child, and now it looked like I was really going there, through my work at least. Growing up, it was this very romantic, magical place that my friends and I wanted to travel to. It wasn’t as far away as Britain or the USA, but it was somewhere that we could get to overland, that held promise, or the possibility of escape.
And so, the idea was hatched that I could have the silk screen re-made for the biennial, in collaboration with my friend and printmaker Ben Gooding, and Camberwell College of Arts. I’m really pleased with how Agnes(2025) – a two-panelled Map Painting – turned out; the way that the magenta paint moved across the canvas created marks on the surface like a river delta. I don’t think I could have done it that way if I had intended to, but by pure chance the way the water carried the paint pigment and detritus over the carrier surface has produced something that speaks to alluvium and silt of the delta’s complicated tributaries.
Water is life, isn’t it! And it’s certainly integral to everything I do, from how I live my daily life, to the inspiration for the work, to the actual making of the work. I was born on the banks of the Essequibo and spent my childhood a stone’s throw from the Berbice, and I’ve spent pretty much my whole adult life living close to big rivers. My home in London is literally one street away from the Thames, and my Brooklyn studio for the past twenty-five years looks out over the East River. Throughout my career, I’ve crossed the Thames twice daily — and in the past it could have been up to six times a day — going to and from the studio. I was also born under a water sign; I’m a Pisces, so I guess water is the stuff I’m made of.
My paintings almost always start with water. The first thing I do is soak the canvas, simply by putting down very thinly watered-down washes of pale colours — often waste-water that keeps the brushes wet overnight — and I just sit and watch what happens in the pool of watery paint as it spreads and bleeds. That might be the first go at the work, or maybe even the first two or three goes at it, and then I start to build layers of paint, thick and thin, wet into wet, or wet into dry, and see how the paint moves. I’m looking to see what starts to emerge in terms of colour and geometry. I sometimes apply the gel and chuck in stuff from the studio floor, like packing material or fabric, to see how it floats, moves, and bleeds. I might add ammonia, pearlescent or gold powder colour or glitter and just let it cook.
My working method today is much more intuitive than in the past. For the last decade or so, I’ve become much freer and more unconstrained — maybe I feel now that anything goes. I’ve learnt to wait for the surprises, and when they come, I try to enjoy what appears. You might have seen it develop over a period of days or weeks, and then one day, you suddenly find that in the mishmash of all the attempts at throwing or dripping, an image appears. It’s all being done by itself. It might be a landmass, or an animal, or a face, or something else that’s recognisable; even a self-portrait. It wasn’t intended, but there it is. You pour the paint, watch it spread and bleed, and it gives you a kind of image that stares back. Even at the age of ninety-one, I feel restless and excited about finding new possibilities, juxtapositions, and formulations.
For many years, I insisted that in my painting, I had turned my back on Guyana. Maybe now it’s time for me to declare that I’m South-American-born — or open to being claimed by the continent. I feel like I’m always thinking about Guyana. I often dream about it nowadays. At my age and state of health, there’s no way now that I can physically travel there, but I’m there all the time, in my dreams and my daytime reverie. My wife, Rachel, tells me that she sometimes hears me calling out in my half sleep, talking in Guyanese dialect — who knows who with? It feels good to know that my paintings are there now, hanging in São Paulo, in South America, the continent of my birth. It is a homecoming of sorts.
Frank Bowling’s works are on view at the 36th Bienal de Sāo Paulo until 11 January 2026.
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