Visual Art / Abstract Painting / Illustration Collage / Text Art
The intersections of modern art and visual literature - colour and abstraction, material, illustration, portraiture, installation, collage techniques and more. Beside my Asemic Writing and Concrete Poetry, this page documents my visual works that often oscillate between mediums.
Here are pages dedicated to my Exhibitions and Art Books
In 2015, I was commissioned to teach at Tate Modern, for a course entitled A Language Art, exploring these techniques in modern art history.
Beir Bua special feature - 8 art-poems from 8 books February 1, 2021
A very energised online journal from Ireland, Beir Bua, edited by Michelle Moloney King, has generously featured my art-poetry as their special focus in their second issue. It collates one example, one art-poem, from eight of my books. It essentially draws upon what I’ve been working on, in exploring visual poetry and the handmade, and the poem brut movement, since the summer of 2017 and prior. It’s satisfying to see it represented in this way, and the issue has some really fine poets in there too, from Gregory Betts to Susan Connolly and many others new to me. Worth checking out https://beirbuajournal.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/issue-2-15.pdf
The works are taken from my books Come and See the Songs of Strange Days (Broken Sleep), due next month, then Crayon Poems (Penteract Press 2020), Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire (Hesterglock Press 2018), The Selected Scribbling and Scrawling of SJ Fowler (2020), I fear my best work behind me (Strange Press 2017), Sticker Poems (due out later in 2021 with Trickhouse Press), Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypcrit (Hesterglock Press 2019) and finally Bastard Poems (due out later in 2021 with Steel Incisors)
Also featured in the issue are short reviews of my books Crayon Poems, Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypocrit and Aletta Ocean Alphabet Empire, kindly penned by the editor, who also reviews my friend and collaborator Christodoulos Makris, as well as introing the issue. https://beirbuajournal.wordpress.com/journal/issue-2/
Crayon Poems with Penteract Press - July 2020
From the publisher - “Crayon Poems is the poetic equivalent of a cat gifting its owner a dead bird, only it’s done with greasy, gentle colours on the page. In an intrepid interrogation of what it is to write, SJ Fowler’s art poetry collection offers a take on childish play and death’s tenacity that is compelling in its abjection. A cheeky nod to the unknowable, it is a gift you don’t want but should be grateful for. Fowler’s colourful crayons, like the bird’s intestines, are bodily, fascinating and undeniable.” www.penteractpress.com / These two crayon artworks below are not within the book, but published on The Abandoned Playground. https://www.theabandonedplayground.org/sjfowler
Logogrammatic Crayon Glyphs
cover
Happy Medium
A Selection of Visual works published online
The Poetry Society Summer Exhibition : July 1st to Sept 1st 2019
www.stevenjfowler.com/invisible
My third solo exhibition in London on the walls of the Poetry Society in Covent Garden. The exhibition collected much of my visual art from 2017 to 2019.
“A visual poem should be visible, yet it seems it’s often not so. In this solo exhibition of new paintings, SJ Fowler asks questions so manifest they are almost indiscernible. What is in the shape of a letter and what images do words recall? What is the meaning of colour in poetry, and where went the handwritten word? Where is mess, notation, scrawling and material? Why is composition strange to an art-form that is as visual as it is sonic? These are works often exploring handwriting, abstraction, illustration, pansemia, scribbling and scrawling”
Unfinished Memmoirs of a Hypcrit - Hesterglock Press (July 2019)
www.stevenjfowler.com/memmoirs “Memmoirs presents the hand-drawn as a viable means of fiction - poetry - writing - art that emphasises context alongside content and challenges restrictive definitions. A book certainly as strange and unfortunately amusing as living mostly is, this is a dispatch from a prolific and future-facing writer attempting to operate on multiple fronts, and failing with aplomb.”
The entire essay featured in the book, about it's methods and meanings, has been generously published by Tentacular Magazine to coincide with its release, and is available to read https://www.tentacularmag.com/elsewhere-blog/new-prim-and-proper
This artwork > was published by GANGAN https://www.gangan.at/50/sj-fowler/
Battalion anthology from Sidekick Books 2018
http://sidekickbooks.com/booklab/books/battalion/
the Battalion anthology is exquisitely beautiful and full of genuinely original visual poetry and illustrative poetry. + I may not be a poet who does nice warm artworks but I can write clean about bats in poems yes I can do.
DESCRIPTION
The bat is a liminal thing, and goes by many cultural identities: aviation expert, clandestine committee member, victim of superstition, delicate contraption, beautiful mishap, miniature aristocrat, occultist, conjuror, ninja. Battalion is your alternative, unregistered guide to bats – a live, writhy cave colony of findings, fixations and sonic experiments. Add your own inky skitterings to the mix, bring it on your evening flit. Take after its denizens: open your mouth and listen to the sky.
Aletta Ocean's Alphabet Empire - Hesterglock Press : 2018
A book of visual poetry, art-poems, abstract paintings, asemic writing and illustrations, all in black indian ink. A book on pornography and disembodied sex. www.stevenjfowler.com/aoae
Three works from the book were published as a Limited Edition postcard set by Stranger Press for the Poetry Book Fair in London, September 2017.
I fear my best work behind me / Stranger Press 2017
A book exploring the fractured, overwhelmed, handmade - brutalist child-like portraiture, abstract illustration and negative space. www.stevenjfowler.com/ifear
I could barely read this, this book changed my life. Tuur Van Balen artist
The works call back to the post-war and latter 20th century explorations of Henri Michaux, Jacques Racquet and the CoBrA group especially – Christian Dotremont, Pierre Alechinsky, Asger Jorn, Lucebert, Gerrit Kouwenaars, Karel Appel – who have been enormously influential on my thinking and work. This book is a reconnection to their principles and practises, knowing it to be familiar ground, but one rarely tread and increasingly necessary in a still predominantly colourless medium.
'Cemetery Portraits' Worm Wood Exhibition - August 2017
A series of portraits, of people who, at the time of painting, were buried in the place the paintings were made - Kensal Green Cemetery, the first of London's magnicifient seven, as part of the Worm Wood exhibition. Portraits of Harold Pinter, James Ballard, Charles Babbage and Isambard Brunel amongst them.
The series was made under the constraint that I could only paint them on site in the Dissenter's Chapel with materials found in the chapel, the catacombs, cemetery stores and in the cemetery grounds.
Collaboration with Jerome Rothenberg : Action Painting at Birkbeck College - October 19, 2016
What an immense pleasure this was. To have the chance to celebrate Jerome Rothenberg, his influence on me, and on so many people. The event was held at Birkbeck College, London, hosted by the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (www.bbk.ac.uk/cprc) on October 17th 2016. / For my performance I carefully selected poems taken from Rothenberg's 1974 collection Poland/1931 and 1978 collection Seneca Journal and after much deliberation, I interspersed them with my own poems that responded / related to these works as influences. In the live performance, the poems were glued to paper to form two long poems, and then illustrated. Then for the last few minutes, wonderfully, Jerome joined me in the painting.
I had the pleasure to then spend a day with Jerome and his wife Diane in London and really feel inspired and humbled by their extraordinary lifetime of travelling, writing and following a path any of us would be lucky to follow. - The performance can be seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD-rn0E-9JQ&feature=emb_logo
Edicola Radetzky group show : Milan 2018
Text art printed on shop windows across Milan
http://www.edicolaradetzky.it/index.html with Massimo Grimaldi; Andrea Romano; Russell Bennetts; Eley Williams & more, Organized by Francesco Tenaglia
Edicola Radetzky Viale Gorizia 34, 20136, Milan, Italy / Saturday, April 14, 2018