Verna Vowles has painted since the 1950’s, beginning with oils and later working with watercolours. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a major in painting from Montreal’s Concordia University in 1978.
For many years, Verna experimented with varying degrees of abstraction in an effort to free herself from representing the natural world. A breakthrough came with tearing watercolour paintings and reassembling the pieces to form collages. The works were closely related to the world we know: trees, rocks, figures, etc., but in abstracted forms.
The freedom of collages opened the way to further abstraction using liquid acrylics. Verna’s technique is a very wet process in which a fluid acrylic-water mixture is brushed or poured on a surface. These paintings are purely motivated by intuition, existing as expressions of thoughts and feelings while evolving with respect to such principles of painting as color, shape, texture and space.
Photo of Verna Vowles by Bernard Clark
