ROY DOWELL

"There’s nothing excessive, far-fetched, outlandish, unbelievable, or even fanciful about Dowell’s blunt, down-to-earth works, which are approachable, unpresuming, and forthright. When Dowell makes a painting, he doesn’t make anything up. Everything, in every last one of the intimately scaled works on paper that he has been making for the last two years, seems to have been found, borrowed, and repurposed—sourced from the world around us. He makes use of the reality anyone (and everyone) can see if they pay attention to the visual phenomena that are commonly thought to belong to the image glut of modern life—an overwhelming, incessant, and inconceivably vast assault on our eyeballs, never mind our minds and sensibilities, that has intensified and expanded exponentially since the digital phase of the information age hit us like a tsunami about forty years ago."

- David Pagel in "The Real Thing"

"Dowell uses translucence as a multiplier: His works are made up of more than one surface—often three or four, sometimes five, six, or seven. And no bedrock lies behind his multi-surfaced works: Everything that matters is visible on the surface, because that is all anyone has access to. No secrets, hidden meanings, or coded messages are present or suggested. Likewise, Dowell’s works never pretend to begin with blank slates or with fantasies of virgin states to be conquered, controlled, and owned. His art is not about dominion in any way, shape, or form. On the contrary, everything in his patient and painstakingly reworked compositions is a matter of adjusting well-used shapes, of mixing impure colors, and of calibrating part-by-part compositions. Everything has been resourcefully resourced and transformed into something filled with so many possibilities that the question of whether it is new or original becomes irrelevant, beside the point, even silly. Whether a composition works is all that matters. And Dowell’s works work, stimulating interest and exciting the imagination, 24/7/365." 

- David Pagel in "The Real Thing"

"In the same way that Dowell’s shapes merge and mutate, his three formats—tabletop still lifes, piled-up patterns, and diptych-style doublings—also merge and mutate. Patterns pop up in still lifes. Mirrored imagery appears in patterns. And all manner of doubling—and doubling-back—occurs just about everywhere, creating a body of work that is impossible to divide into tidy, hard-and-fast categories or cut-and-dried subsets. That, in a sense, is the point of everything Dowell does: to get us to see connections between and among seemingly disparate things; to discover relationships between and among otherwise unrecognizable or unnameable things; and to find ourselves in the midst of it all, searching and seeking and finding pleasure and meaning on our own terms, over and over again. Although you know that there’s no such thing as Visionary Realism, Dowell makes you feel that such antithetical approaches to art making may not be such strange bedfellows after all, especially in the hands of an artist whose works are so adept at defying expectations and getting us to see things we’ve never seen."

- David Pagel in "The Real Thing"