Fred Fowler: New Landscapes

Fred Fowler was painting Melbourne’s streets in the early 2000s, when the city was building the reputation that would make it one of the capitals of the form. A decade on, in 2012, he finished a Master of Contemporary Art, and the work he makes now carries both histories: the graffiti writer’s attachment to symbols and marks, and a slow, process-heavy studio practice that takes in painting, etching, sculpture and installation.

His first show at Backwoods Gallery, Decorating The Apocalypse, set the imagery of consumer brands against the tribal energy of graffiti. The follow-up, New Landscapes, opens at Backwoods on 20 June, and it takes on something larger: what modern Australia has done to the land and to the people who lived on it first. Fowler talked through the show with the UK street-art quarterly Very Nearly Almost ahead of the opening.

Skateboards, then walls

He traced his route into art back to childhood. Both his parents are architects and encouraged him to draw and paint from the start. He has skated since he was six, and the board graphics of the 1980s and 1990s left a deep mark: the Bones Brigade era, Marc McKee’s early work for World Industries, and the hand-drawn grip tape of the skater Sean Sheffey. At about fifteen, older friends showed him Style Wars, and from then on graffiti took over. Art in the wider sense came later.

A second influence came from his father, who grew up in Papua New Guinea. The family home was full of paintings, prints and carvings by PNG artists, and Fowler counts that collection as a major influence on his work.

Semi-abstract, and slow on purpose

Asked to describe his work, he called it semi-abstract visual poetry. He uses a lot of symbols and deliberately blurs them so they stay open to more than one reading. He admitted that he enjoys making things more than anything else about being an artist, and he chooses techniques that are hard and slow for that reason: drypoint etching, oil paint, carving, casting in bronze, ceramics.

New Landscapes

The new show is, on its face, a set of Australian landscape paintings. The creatures in them are the point. Native species such as birds, goannas, quolls and bats share the pictures with introduced ones, cats and cane toads among them, and Fowler uses the tension between the two to look at what colonisation has done to the country and to its original inhabitants. A handful of seascapes, with sea animals and boats, extend the idea out to the water. Titles such as A Bridge Divider Between Native and Invasive Species, Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre and Sydney Harbour Superboats give some sense of where his head is.

He sees the paintings as political, but he hopes they can be enjoyed as handsome landscapes too, and he likes the challenge of keeping the subversive side from being too obvious. That idea of “subtle subversion” runs through everything he makes. He argued that art should stand against mass media and mainstream culture, and that it is in open competition with the advertising industry for the same walls and the same attention.

Humble and curious

Asked what he was proudest of, he said simply supporting himself through his work. The high points for him are the experiences: a round-the-world painting trip with friends, and meeting his godfather, the late Rammellzee, in New York in 2007. Asked what made him laugh, he named his whippet, Dizzy, who mostly sleeps.

His advice to anyone wanting to get into the scene was blunt: do not, unless there is no other choice, because making a living as an artist is extremely hard work. If there is no other choice, keep your head down, stay humble and never stop being curious.

For the rest of 2014 he had just set up a kiln in his studio and was hoping to make ceramics, alongside larger paintings once the show was up.