BOLDLY GO

26 April - 31 May 2025

ROWENA COMRIE

Educated at the University of Reading, taught by Terry Frost and Mali Morris, Rowena Comrie has used the aesthetics of colourfield and abstract expressionism as potent means of communicating feelings and ideas. This limitless aesthetic opens up free association that can stimulate the viewer's imagination 'beyond space & time' to explore feelings untouched by conventional attitudes. Working from her studio in Glasgow, she continues to capture fleeting visions that arrive from long developed ideas. Her method requires a spontaneous and energetic means of paint application tempered by an objective assessment of chance occurrences, known to surrealists as 'Objective Chance'.

Rowena spent her youth in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, and those seaside years left a lasting love of coastal environments, sublime horizons and infinite skies. She has now been based in Glasgow for 15 years having previously spent 20 years in Aberdeen. Appreciative of the varieties of natural forces in both East and West coastlines, Rowena finds in the constant movement of the seas and weather, an ironic sense of change and stabilization. This contradiction symbolises Rowena's attitude to painting - a feeling for the paradoxical. Making the real and the abstract resonate with ideas and feelings.

Recent career developments include in 2022 designing and collaborative painting of the Iron Heart & Public Health Mural at the former Malcolm Cockburn Foundry, Falkirk; President of Paisley Art Institute 2020-21, Current Satellite Council Member of the Society of Scottish Artists, from 2020. President of the Scottish Artist Union 2011-2014. Rowena has exhibited regularly in the USA and throughout the UK, in 2019 presenting 'NEW VIEWS OF THE OLD WORLD', in Bloomington, Indiana. Her work is held by Museum and private collections. She has been involved in mentoring, curating, education, and art workshops.

Rowena is currently co chair of the Art Department in Paisley, the producers of The Big Art Show.