You Don't Mess with Mother Nature Painting

Brooke McGowen is a painter based in Northern California whose practice entails squirting paint from bottles to generate figurative forms and landscapes. The interaction of flowing color defines a figurative situation, leaving much to the viewer’s imagination. In McGowen’s paintings, fluid paint swirls and disperses at will, following the principles of fluid dynamics. The surprise aspect of the flowing paint offers a window to unexpected possibilities of perception. Brooke McGowen studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Art Academy in Vienna, Austria. After living in Germany and Portugal, the artist returned to New York City in 2008. She was in group exhibitions at Exit Art in Chelsea and North Light Gallery in Brooklyn. McGowen had a solo show in 2012 titled “Political Paintings”, curated by “Fashion Moda”. In 2017 and 2019, her work was featured at the Hudson Guild Gallery in Chelsea, New York and in 2019 in a show called “Flowing Figures” at M. David & Co. Gallery in Brooklyn. In 2017 McGowen published an art book “The Waterdrinkers”, funded through Kickstarter. In 2018 McGowen moved to remote area of Northern California where she lives with her husband and their Portuguese Mastiff, Tejo. Here she has converted a shed into a studio where she can let the paint flow in celebration of the surrounding wilderness. In March 2020, the Little Raven Gallery of San Francisco showed her paintings in a solo exhibition titled “New Paintings”. Her work was presented in the Sacramento Arts Center in December 2021. Recently, McGowen was accepted for a residency at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica funded by a grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation.