Painting in Trinidad since 1985, a lot of paint has gone down in that time. I am aware that I pushed surfaces routinely to oblivion and in a few seconds the whole plot would change.

A thousand influences is the tip of the mental and conscious internal iceberg.

I do not know what to say about why my work is, I spent many years thinking abut that but meantime had to carry on making, so the answer was answering all the time. Commenting about the world, society, our time, relevance, identity problems to be solved, issues of importance, it’s all the time really- take your pick. Where/how that infiltrates art is these days is a favourite discussion amongst academics and many artists, as if to prove art? I have great difficulty often just balancing the weights of colours on a flat surface.

These works of recent timings: compressed thoughts, weaves, cancellations, distress, the therapy of walking. I live by the sea. Every morning there is a creeping mist that comes off the water’s edge to meet the dense north coast green bush; I live in, the studio is in that physical edge and watery ionized mist, I caught buckets of rainwater to mix the acrylic, it was obvious.

I was warned that I would “boil down like bhagi”, that didn’t happen although many times reduced to despair, tears, recognizing the everydayness of mayhem and other people’s mess, I decided not, not, to boil down, that was death. I became the cook in the kitchen with colours, each new image like a meal, sometimes a snack, often a full blown banquet.

I am proud, glad to be exhibiting again in Trinidad. The next time it might well be somewhere else, but here is where the laboratory is, the kitchen, workshops; far from the periphery of an art world, I feel somehow these days curiously centered- that distancing and relativity dissolved, for many years as a young one I was in the north…it was actually great.

– Edward Bowen