‘The possibilities of paint are never-ending’: Sir Frank Bowling interviewed

‘I’m full of excitement waiting for this to dry out,’ Sir Frank Bowling exclaims. We are sitting in his studio, a room in a quiet Victorian yard that survives amid the tower blocks of Elephant and Castle. In front of us a semi-finished canvas – a glorious welter of yellow and orange in diverse modulations – is pinned to the wall.

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It’s executed in acrylics, a water-based material. Bowling, like Turner – one of his heroes – believes in using buckets of water, sometimes more or less literally. ‘I don’t always use conventional tools to mark the surface,’ he confides. ‘Sometimes marks are made by a brush, sometimes by simply flinging the paint at the canvas.’ Such matters have long fascinated Bowling. ‘The possibilities of paint are never-ending,’ he once announced. And he has been exploring novel ways of putting it on canvas since Winston Churchill was prime minister: new combinations of colour, surface, texture, density, fluidity, thickness and thinness. Having weathered a period of relative neglect, Bowling is now widely regarded as one of the most inventive painters alive.

Two days after we spoke, Bowling celebrated his 91st birthday. He began life in the town of Bartica in what was then British Guiana, now Guyana. Since that moment, getting on for a century ago, he has travelled on a long transatlantic odyssey. He first crossed the ocean to London in coronation year, 1953. Then from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s Bowling shifted to New York. These days he sticks to London.

At night in bed he stares at the cracks in the ceiling, thinking about new pictures and how they might evolve.