Emerging Artist Series
The Light of the Body is the Eye
A Solo Exhibition of Works by Brent Rowley
The Light the Dead See
No More My Splintered Heart and Maddened Hand Were Turned Against the Wolfish World
Be Ahead of All Parting
The Light of the Body is the Eye
My Will: His Will That Fronts Me. Seas Between
Mercury Slaying Argus
All Things Separate, Return
At the Still Point of the Turning World
Under the Calm of the Eye’s Lowered Lid
The Flaying of Marsyas
The Painter
Let Go the Root. Move With the World
Corpses Rise, Gashes Heal, Fastenings Roll From Me
As It Happened—As It Was Meant to Happen
Unspeakable Home
Artist Statement
The goal of my art is to express the tension between stability and transience. To this end, I employ traditional compositional frameworks in an abstracted way stripped of historical narratives. Through spontaneous and accidental mark-making techniques, I seek to push these traditional compositions to their breaking points. The success or failure of a piece depends on both the adherence to form and the rebellion against it. My art is engaged with the historicity of artistic creation, resurrecting tradition at the same time as it deconstructs it. The past is seen through a fragmentary and distorted lens, a lens which also reveals a present that is perhaps strange and new to us.
Brent J. Rowley was born and raised in Arkansas. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Hendrix College and an MA in TESOL from Arkansas Tech University. After spending nearly a decade teaching English abroad in Russia, Georgia, and Japan, he returned to the United States in 2019. He now has a studio in Russellville, Arkansas, where he devotes many long hours to painting. While largely self-taught, his art is informed by an intensive study of technique and art history. He utilizes a variety of media, including watercolor, wax pastel, charcoal, acrylic ink, india ink, and alcohol ink. In 2020 he received honorable mention in the South Arkansas Art Center Under Quarantine Art Competition for his work, ‘Police in Little Rock Tear Gas Protestors.’ His piece, ‘Bebia,’ was selected for the 2021 Mid-Southern Watercolorists 51st Annual Exhibition. In 2021 he spent two months creating the series, ‘The Light of the Body is the Eye’ at the Sarasvati Artist Residency in Hohenwald, Tennessee."