Jan Tips Rowe
new paintings

 

Philip John Evett, Jan Tips Rowe and Charles Field

 

 

 

Jan Tips Rowe

                       

 

  
   

Left:“The Garden”
acrylic on canvas/ 60 x 45” / 2010
$3,500.

Right:“The Garden II”
acrylic on canvas/ 60 x 45” / 2010

$3,500


   

“Fall”
acrylic on canvas/ 60 x 45 “/ 2011

$3,500		    



Jan Tips Rowe

Jan Tips Rowe (b. 1942, San Antonio, Texas), received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas at Austin and a Masters of Arts from Trinity University. Jan Rowe has taught Art and History of Art at Saint Mary's Hall, the San Antonio Art Institute, and the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Her works have been internationally shown and collected. Her work has been exhibited throughout Texas, and in Washington, DC, Monterrey, Mexico, Newport Beach California, Sheeveport Louisiana, and Lima, Peru. Public collections where her work may be seen include the McNay Art Museum, Southwest Research Institute, the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Arts Council of San Antonio, and the Instituto Cultural Peruano in Lima.

Artist statement :

Jan Rowe's new paintings are a surprising departure from what she has done in the past. The imagery of gardens,trees, and leaves in autumn has replaced the more abstracted landscape forms and architectural floor plans of her previous work. The scale of these new paintings remains constant to the abstractions for which she is known. Her use of color in these works is based in reality, but is heightened and is often set against a black background. The space is shallow, and the forms of leaves, flowers, trees and vegetables in a garden are simplified. These paintings are unexpected yet are recognizably consistent with her style.

 

 

 

San Antonio Express News

Steve Bennett

Two of San Antonio’s most venerated artists — Jan Tips Rowe and Philip John Evett — are full of surprises in an exhibition of new work at Radius on Auditorium Circle.
Tips Rowe, long known for her elegant abstract paintings, offers a dose of realism having immersed herself in a friend’s garden over the past couple of years and returned with shimmering works depicting plants, trees and vegetables — and, in “The Trap,” an unlucky dove.
“It’s a good thing,” the 67-year-old artist says of the direction her latest work, such as the breathtaking “Burning Bush,” has turned. “I just fell into it. I just started painting the vegetable garden. Of course, I studied life drawing years ago, so it’s not like I don’t have a history of doing this sort of thing. You want to stay interested, and this is one way of doing that.”
Tips Rowe’s new work, however, is not sunny landscapes and happy vegetables bursting with flavor. In fact, she picks the moribund eggplant, an acquired taste, to paint in a couple of works. And “Burning Bush” depicts loosely painted green ferns and a red-leafed bush (photinia?) against a dark background.
Most of these paintings have shadowy backdrops, with the notable exception of the vibrant apricot of “Sunset,” lending the work an ominous air, a reminder that dangers can lurk in the woods.
“Fall” is a tour de force of color, a palette of reds and oranges and yellows against a deep violet background. Yet it, too, reminds us that autumn is the end of a cycle, as does the gorgeous composition “Sunset,” a painting Tips Rowe says she struggled with.
“I really worked on that color,” she says of an indescribable orange. “It was too dark, too light. I painted it over several times trying to get that quality when the sun is going down and the light is strong in the western sky.”
Perhaps Tips Rowe hasn’t really voyaged that far from her abstract leanings, such as a recent series in reds and black based on architectural floor plans, after all. As gallery owner Joan Grona notes, “These paintings are unexpected yet are recognizably consistent with her style.”
The new paintings can be seen as collections of simple abstract shapes, and, as Tips Rowe points out, “Everything is right upfront in these paintings. It’s a very shallow space.”
It’s a compressed space, and the brush strokes are freely applied. But Tips Rowe is painting actual objects and understands that her new work “is going to surprise a lot of people.”
In a good way, no doubt.
Tips Rowe, whose husband was revered abstract painter Reginald Rowe, says she was at loose ends after his death in 2007 and perhaps was searching for a new challenge artistically. She discovered it in the garden.
“It was a period when I was trying to put my life back together,” she says, “after Reggie died.”
What would he say about the new work?
She flashes a shy smile: “Oh, Reggie would be shocked, I’m sure.”
Best known for his wooden sculptures of abstract human forms, 88-year-old Phil Evett is showing a series of drawings that are obviously related to his sculpture but just as obviously not a blueprint for the three-dimensional work.
“I’ve always drawn,” says Evett, professor emeritus of Trinity University, “but I’ve never drawn for my sculpture.”
The work is free and expressive, focused on the female form, but full of small surprises — dogs, cats, strange machines. And is that Woodstock of the “Peanuts” gang driving one of those wheeled contrivances?
“It’s free drawing in a sense,” says Evett, a charming native of England with a precise accent and a droll sense of humor. “I start by making marks on the paper and just follow my hand, as it were. When I start to draw, I don’t know what the drawing will become. What develops is almost like a psychological daydream. Oddly enough, I know when to stop. Ah well, I did have a good education.”
New paintings by Jan Tips Rowe and drawings by Philip John Evett remain on view at Radius, 106 Auditorium Circle, through Sept. 2.

 


jgrona@satx.rr.com

 


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