For over 30 years Roy Dowell has been making elegant works on paper. His modest sized collages combine newspaper images, commercial posters, colored paper as well as pencil and paint. Each collage is unique, a world unto itself, to be looked at and looked into. Dowell's works are not spontaneous but rather formal studies of shape, color and composition. In the gallery setting the works play off one another to give rise to a narrative about the abstraction as one moves from image to image. While there is no overly political or social message to the works, often one can delight in finding within the collaged elements a subtle headline or text fragments that steers the work into a surprising and unpredictable direction.
Published courtesy of ArtScene ©2009
