Beyond Forever – Rowena Comrie

Presenting abstract oil paintings from the past five years, this exhibition offers an encounter with the oppositional ideas of otherworldliness and functionality painted in harmony.

Many of these paintings relate to Lake Michigan, Chicago. As a visitor to the unimaginably vast expanse of fresh water that is Lake Michigan, I was left with an indelible memory of the strange, almost alien force encompassed by and contained within. An unbroken horizon wider than the field of vision, contradicts the idea of a lake. The lack of tides and the fresh water defy the notion of a Sea. Like all bodies of water, its colours are defined by the weather, but Lake Michigan has its own innumerably subtle shades that as a painter, I’m challenged to produce in my work. The ‘cribs’, historic buildings dotting the lake are further mysteries that on investigation turn out to be water intakes, surrounding and protecting, collecting and supplying fresh water to the City of Chicago and its suburbs – 9 million people – water that is pumped through tunnels built in the 1900s beneath the lake, an awe inspiring engineering feat. Circular and oval tunnels located 200 feet beneath the lake, up to 20 feet in diameter, carry water from the cribs to onshore pumping stations and purification plants.

A selection of these paintings result from my encounter with this body of water. They show aspects of the lake symbolically, the oppositional ideas of otherworldliness and functionality painted in harmony. The power contained and its potential force expressed in paint reveal a contradiction to the usual placid appearance of the lake. The beautiful colours, the transparency and variety of tone combine, comprising an edgeless mass of subtle movement and force contained within unseen boundaries. On looking away from the hypnotic horizon, the view becomes industrial, steelworks hazily peeping up in the distance behind the shining cityscape of contemporary skyscrapers dominating the shoreline. The Lake Michigan paintings embody my personal response with an aesthetic consideration for the sublime. Other paintings have been selected from the artist’s recent work and these represent the further development of ideas and thoughts that have grown from the same source.

Educated at the University of Reading, 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 13 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 permanence. 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 Co-chairing Art Paisley Ltd (The Big Art Show) 2022-24; 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. Awards include professional development funding from Creative Scotland, and in support of ‘Beyond Forever’, a grant from the Hope Scott Trust as well as practical assistance from Wasps Artists Studios. She has received prizes from various institutions including Paisley Art Institute and Aberdeen Artists Society.