Gretta Bowen

Gretta Bowen occupies a unique place within Irish art. Unlike the Tory Island primitive painters, she had no followers or colleagues who worked in a similar manner. She maintained a entirely individual vision throughout her belated but productive career and the honesty with which she translated her vision into paint ensured that it never became self-conscious or hackneyed.

Born in Dublin in 1880, she appears to have only begun to paint around 1950. Two of Bowen’s sons were highly talented artists, Arthur and George Campbell, the latter becoming particularly successful. Gretta Bowen seems to have simply turned to painting because she had the materials to hand but she must have been inspired to some extent by them, although it appears that she used her maiden name to avoid any obvious connection with them.

She clearly attracted notice early on despite her late start. In 1959, Bowen was given a solo exhibition by the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which continued to support her work when it subsequently became the Arts Council. An extensive and admiring review appeared in ‘The Times’.

Gretta Bowen’s work was shown at the Royal Hibernian Academy, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and the Oireachtas, and she also held one-person exhibitions at the Hendriks Gallery, the Bell Gallery and the Tom Caldwell Gallery . At the age of 100 she was invited to participate in the first International Exhibition of Naïve Art in London

As with many other naïve and primitive painters, Gretta Bowen’s paintings often deal with specific moments or memories, both personal recollections and collective memories of the community in which the artist lived. The intensity and detail with which these memories are treated, the complete absorption in that moment, lend a genuine emotion to the work and in Bowen’s case, as with another naïve women artist of a similar period, Helen Bradley, there is a warmth in the recollection of these moments. The simplicity of their approach to the image transmits the indiscriminate and non-analytical manner in which a child experiences events. The ability to retain this vision even as an adult is one of Bowen’s great gifts.

The technical spontaneity of her painting is key to this sense of immediacy. Paint is usually applied direct from the tube and unmixed and compositions appear to be arranged intuitively. Gretta Bowen had a strong sense of rhythm and balance that drives her paintings. Her work is often cluttered with detail in her determination to say as much as possible about that memory. The elements of a painting are arranged with a suggestion of space in which distances are usually suggested and connected by cursive, descriptive lines of paths, rivers, buildings or people, yet the lack of perspective retains a two-dimensional flatness. Not only does this keep the painting close to the manner in which a child might arrange a composition, it can also create the effect of the space toppling out towards us and suggest the excitement and energy of the moment.

Her work is in the collection of the Ulster Museum and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, who also have a portrait of Bowen painted by her son George.