Frank Bowling: Painting as Practice, Painting as Thought.
CALL FOR PAPERS.

Seminars, Conference, edited Journal.

Call for papers for a series of research seminars dedicated to the artistic, historical, and pedagogical legacy of Sir Frank Bowling OBE RA.

Bowling is one of Britain’s most significant painters. Through examining his work, we would like to understand how contemporary painting is an active site of research, knowledge production, and interdisciplinary enquiry.

We invite new scholarship, in the form of 20-minute papers, or 20-minute presentations of practice-based research that address all aspects of Bowling’s work.

Specific themes we are interested in exploring include:

1. Bowling: Transnational Trajectories and Global Art Histories:
Focusing on the cross-border realities of Bowling’s career, and connections with the US and Caribbean. We seek specific scholarship around how Bowling’s paintings and related British painting traditions and cultures, intersected with Globalised art historical frameworks, including Bowling’s interactions with and observations on such issues as Black Art and Greenbergian modernism.

2. Bowling: Practice, Pedagogy, and the Archive:
We would like to further understand the differing pedagogic environment in painting that Bowling encountered and contributed to in the UK and the US, to explore Bowling’s impact on institutional histories and the legacy of artist-educators.

3. Bowling: The Studio as Engine: Material and Embodied Knowledge:
We seek papers that focus on the physical studio as a site of intellectual enquiry and how Bowling’s studio experimentation and findings shaped his and other artists engagement with colour, geometry, and material properties of form.

4. Bowling: Interdisciplinary Currents: Painting Beyond the Canvas:
We also seek to see how Bowling’s painterly concerns extend beyond painting, and into sculpture, architecture, typography, digital media, film, and design.

Initially draft papers will be presented and discussed in a series of seminars (online or in London at the Frank Bowling Foundation at Peacock Yard between July 2027 – Jan 2028). We are applying for funding for a two-day conference to be held in May 2028 at Camberwell and Chelsea Colleges of Arts, UAL, where a selection of redeveloped papers would then be presented. Papers will be published in a Special Issue of the Journal of Contemporary Painting edited by Paul Goodwin and Daniel Sturgis.

The project is a collaboration between University of the Arts London and the Frank Bowling Foundation. It brings together the research environment of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Research Centre (TrAIN) at Chelsea College of Arts, led by Professor Paul Goodwin; the Journal of Contemporary Painting; the ongoing scholarly and material-based research in painting at Camberwell College of Arts, led by Professor Daniel Sturgis; and the Frank Bowling Foundation's archive as a primary research resource.

Bowling's own connection to both colleges, as a student at Chelsea and a teacher at Camberwell, makes UAL a fitting home for the project.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words along with a 150 word biography by 31st January 2027 to Professor Daniel Sturgis: d.sturgiscamberwell.arts.ac.uk