Owsley’s BANK ROCK BAY series, his most ambitious project to date, is comprised of a series of 25 canvases, painted over the course of a decade. The subject of these paintings is a small inlet located just north of the boat lake and south of The Delacorte Theatre in New York’s iconic Central Park…a place where land, air and water collide to create a series of impressions that are all at once enchanting, serene, mysterious, spiritual, evocative and forever-changing.

His paint is applied to canvas in a unique and painterly manner, and his brushwork and handling of the paint is direct, tactile and physical. Each image is dominated by the circle, which to Owsley represents the ‘totality’ of life. The circle is one of the great primordial symbols of human kind, and emblematic of life, death and resurrection itself: You are born, you grow, you go and you come back.

By using the square form as his support, he obliterates any traditional sense of boundary or separation between the elements, further promoting a feeling of connectivity between all facets of the scenes, where air, water and land cohabitate as a single, living, breathing presence. Each painting not only communicates with the viewer, but with each of the other paintings, as well, creating a dialogue between scenes that is sweetly lyrical and fully engaging.

As opposed to many of his earlier works that were almost exclusively painted en plein air, these larger, conceptual landscapes are painted solely in the studio with the aid of photographs, sketches, field studies and from the artist’s wildly vivid imagination and multi-colored memory.

CRITIQUE

"The paintings (The Bank Rock Bay Series) have a consistent and startling originality. The iconic power of the large natural forms is transformed by facile brushwork and delightful use of color into works that are almost poetically pantheistic. Generally, the paintings are a nice size – one that could accommodate both corporate and private collections. I think the works would appeal to both traditional and modern viewers since their beguiling mood is carried on an adventuresome treatment of form and space. I immediately knew when I first viewed his work that here was a naturally gifted, intuitive painter – a genius in that sense."

Howard F. Collins
Renaissance Art Historian &
apprentice to American water 
colorist, Charles Burchfield