ROY DOWELL

"Many of Dowell’s recent paintings have organizing features (circles, diamonds, open umbrellas, crosses, carbide blades) that then wander, dissolve, radiate, run, or simply ease into the pattern and texture, and the compositional oddities that unseat their primacy. They stare at you, hold you at attention, then soften and deepen into intricate personalities. Dowell’s canvases, most often vertical, hold abstraction inside their frames like the beliefs and fantasies of individual brains, so often laced with idiosyncrasy and speaking in their own dialects."

"In Roy Dowell’s "untitled #1181," there is a wonderfully odd red stripe at the top. It seems like a brazen gesture. It began, Dowell told me, with abstracting from a tantric diagram, which radiates out into wobbly blue spirals that tilt the central event into a flower or a cosmological map of the sun, its orbiters, and adjacent galaxies. The landscape at the bottom then steps shyly forward, as though a hair’s breadth in from the center. A denim sea. Tugboats perhaps. And I notice the red stripe. It clips the spirals and disrupts the pictorial logic. The stripe sits on the canvas, neither background or foreground, and the whole picture pulses with strangeness."

- Ed Schad in "Pinwheels at the Edge of Dawn: Roy Dowell's New Paintings"