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What you will find here

Photo credit to Bryan Putnam.

What you will find here is the personal website and blog of Sterling Bowen. I’m an abstractionist, blogger, aspiring curator and occasional instructor living in Raleigh, NC. Please subscribe if you’d like a little daily abstraction in your inbox (and tell a friend).

On this site you’ll find content about my paintings and installation work. My blogs often address my practice, and Art (with a big “A”) and society. I also post daily about other artists, 1,900+ and counting, with a focus on non-figurative modalities. If you are curious as I am about this slice of the Art community, you can look for creatives of interest by searching hashtags or peruse a thumbnail diary of works to find something new. If you know who you’re interested in or looking for more about, just use the search bar below.

BTW, “yes” the name of this blog is a reference to Arthur Danto’s collection of essays After the End of Art.

Sharon Butler

No one who regularly reads this blog will be surprised to see Sharon’s name, but perhaps surprised for me to blog about her. I have of course (before today), originally in 2020, as I was first discovering my favorite blogazine, when she juried/curated The Daily. The second image below is from a series of paintings that she was making at the time based on very quick sketches she was doing on her phone. The work for me was a step beyond provisional painting, and had a sincerity and love for materials that is lacking in that group. As a creative focused on the active faith it takes to produce in a time after Art has died, while holding the contradiction that it is likely a pointless activity, really resonated, and still does.

Sharon has started off 2026 with a couple of very interesting projects-one at McBride Dillman* and another at CLEA RSKY – so I wanted to update my flowers for her.

*from the gallery- “Sharon Butler’s “new casualism” takes up the incomplete, the provisional, and the unfinished as meaningful categories. Her paintings challenge the authority of polish and perfection, foregrounding process as a form of truth-telling.”

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#sharonbutler

Kate Nartker

had an amazing show overlapping the turn of the year: Cutting Room at Anchorlight. Not all of it was abstraction of course, and her interest in non-representational forms (like Sabrina) relates to optics- to be clear her main interests are in film and the history of women’s labor. Fascinating stuff- oh did I mention these are made on a loom?

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#katenartker

Sabrina Gschwandtner

Mostly posting this for local folks who, like me, fell in love with Kate Nartker’s work because of her recent exhibition at Anchorlight (yes I’ll do a blog about Kate tomorrow). And! Yes, there are images embedded in these patterns- opticality and film are part of a Venn diagram that overlaps many concepts with which abstraction is concerned.

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#sabrinagschwandtner

William Tillyer

I first became aware of Tillyer’s work when I stepped into Bernard Jacobson’s booth at the 2020 iteration of the Armory Show, which is also when I learned that Jon Yau called William the most adventurous artist of our time. That’s high praise indeed considering he’s a contemporary of David Hokney, Howard Hodgkin and Richard Hamilton. Yes that’s means this blog is year another refresh.

Grace Palmer did a nice review of The Watering Place at Jacobson last Fall about “the Art world’s misunderstood beauty.”

#williamtillyer

Hedda Sterne

I first blogged about Hedda in early 2020 because I was so over the moon to see MOMA give Hedda her due in their (at the time) new gallery reconfiguration. Hedda has a prominent place in Art History as the only woman Artist featured in Nina Leen’s iconic Life Magazine photograph of the New York Abstract Expressionist group’s “membership” (below).

Jason at Two Coats has words about the recent Dreamscapes at Van Doren Wexter.

I am continually in awe of the #9thstreetwomen* and their truly Modernist commitment to artistic practice- they always made work, even as their male counterparts (and spouses!) stole the limelight. *Speaking of the now well known tome, enjoy this interview (YouTube video in link) with author Mary Gabriel (I know I will).

#heddasterne

Warren Isensee

Isensee is an NC-born painter. Riad at Whitehot notes his newest at Miles McEniry.

I first blogged about their work early on (2018!), and att I made a note about how Neo-Geo almost ruined abstract painting (Warren has been making work since the 80’s- here is something from 2001) and that to my eye their practice is committed to formalism (writing that his work is too insistent on being seen to be a sign for some conceptual “agenda”).

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