Beautiful paintings, pastels and drawings to enhance your home, your mind and your life!
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			Valerie Bowes is an artist who speaks to the soul and the heart. Over the years of her working life her personal experiences of love and despair, hope and joy have been mirrored in work full of both shadows and light – work that touches people in many different ways. Colour for Val is an expression of feeling, resonating with the colours of the heart. It’s frequently astonishing – and many people experience this – to see a new piece of her work for the first time and know the vivid story or state it tells. The colours you see inside yourself at these moments are the colours Val captures. She’s braver and more untrammelled than we are; she says what we’ve been seeing, but haven’t dared say. It’s one of the many ways in which her work is unusual and striking. The things she chooses to depict have their own voices and notes. A white feather on a grey background, though fixed in the picture, moves through a soft landscape of forgetfulness. A church on a hill is suffused with the light of dawn, or is it evening? Or maybe it’s history, the past, forgotten. A shimmering city glimmers on the edge of a cold, wide ocean; a woman gazes at her reflection in a mirror, wondering if there’s anyone there; the stubble of a cut cornfield speaks quietly of winter. It’s hard to say how exactly Val’s work expresses this profundity of narrative, movement, mood and meaning. But it’s not unusual to respond to it as to something sacred, even transcendent – and this is something she works towards deliberately. She’ll often use a shrine, a place of prayer or meditation, the enclosed human space of universal hopes, dreams and fears, to express her own truth in a language beyond words. Many people love Val's art for this. It moves through many inner states and outer landscapes. It’s meaningful; and that’s a gift. Christina Zaba
	All images © Valerie Bowes 2005		Design : freeman