Margaret Bowland is a Caucasian artist born in Burlington, North Carolina in 1953. She currently resides and continues to work out of Brooklyn, New York where she continues to create new pieces of artwork and continue her ambitions of paintings. Her paintings revolve around true beauty and how much people, woman in specific, change or hide themselves to be beautiful or be what is considered beautiful in today’s world. Through her paintings, she then questions, “How do we know who we really are if disguises and other people’s desires take us further from who we are?” I personally relate to her paintings as at a very young age, I questioned by beauty and relied on disguises such as makeup, working out, and even thought about cosmetic surgery.
Bowland portrays in her art both Caucasian and African American ethnicities as the issue of race does not define how an individual feels inside as they identify with their true selves. All ethnicities and races throughout the world experience the complexity and struggle of whom one’s self truly is. Although it is right within each the whole time, it takes the power of one’s self to truly discover what’s within. Bowland empowers this idea of self-beauty in her paintings by depicting the raw and uncut versions of Caucasian and African American men, women, girls, and boys. She also uses the technique of painting on skin so that her subject truly embodies their self-identity and she tries her best as the artist to envision her subject’s beauty through her eyes as she accepts that it is her ‘self-directed responsibility and choice.’
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| Margaret Bowland, The Artist, 2010 |
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| Margaret Bowland, One Child, 2015 |
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