Reflections on Light Studies

A Review of Bruce Rowe’s Light Studies
2011

Light Studies is a gentle and generous offering of stillness within movement. Rowe’s grids of colour occupy a flux which is organic and raw yet designed and elegant. The captivating watercolours are each a series of protean yet deliberate and repetitive line markings made onto an underlying matrix of barely detectable drafted blue lines. Between the scaffolding of blue gridlines and the watery daub-lines lies a basal layer of colour. The layers are colourmetrically entangled; what hue lies underneath forever affects the over-layered markings and vice-versa. The relationship between layers is further influenced by the saturation of the watercolours, unpremeditated and guided by Rowe’s native process. At the edges of shapes and where the colours blend – it is at these points that the magic happens.

Stillness in stillness is not the real stillness. Only when there is stillness in movement can the spiritual rhythm appear.
– Taoist saying

There is a vibrational quality about the works that gives them life. The watercolours are both uplifting and grounding; they are expressions of the spirit, the mind and the body. Many of the works have a quality not unlike the sea; affected by currents and undercurrents, wind direction and strength, swell and salt concentration. Rowe’s watercolours could be cellular code or a collection of walking records; maps of sensory events, frame by frame, with each daub mark a metaphoric or literal footstep through place and time. The pieces are indeed a record of a dynamic and disciplined methodology; a prolific and ritualistic practice. The artistic process is both drafted and of chance, with Rowe’s practice of architecture and design finding a symbiosis with the uncertainty of real time and an intention of spirit. The resonance of movement felt in reading the works is close to kinaesthetic; where kinaesthesia makes one aware of one’s own body in motion and heightens all other five senses. Gentle kinaesthesia, like that experienced by walking, is our most natural accompaniment to clear thought and is also mnemonic. One suspects that the artist has felt this same resonance in the making of the works; a stillness in movement.