‘My life has always been about painting

Born in 1936 in Bartica in British Guyana, Bowling did not come to painting immediately. ‘I didn’t know anything about museums and art because I was trying to write,’ he tells me, before alluding to the literary heritage of New Amsterdam, the town where he grew up. Bowling moved to London as a teenager in 1953 and did national service in the RAF, where he met Keith Critchlow, a talented draughtsman about to begin his studies at the Royal College of Art. Critchlow introduced Bowling to his art-school friends and took him to the National Gallery, where he was struck by the English landscape tradition. Over the following years, he says, ‘Painting got a grip on me and so I just painted all the time’; it became ‘more engaging and satisfying than writing’. Following a stint at the Chelsea School of Art, in 1959 Bowling was accepted on a scholarship to the RCA, where his contemporaries included David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, and Patrick Caulfield. Was there a spirit of competitiveness? ‘Yes, I felt there was a hum,’ says Bowling, while also acknowledging his disadvantage at not having studied art at an earlier age; others had ‘the edge’. Driven to improve, he graduated in 1962, winning the silver medal to Hockney’s gold.
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