Artistic soulmates?

this post is very belated owing to intensive work at NPG 
and half-finished, but still i hope worth posting





As a result of visiting the exhibitions of work by Natalia Goncharova and Frank Bowling in the same week, i was struck by their comparability [if there is such a word, not meaning similarity]

Both used colour so dynamically, in the sense of colour being the dramatic driving force of the visual image, whether figurative or abstract or in-between.


Then each was personally displaced from their lands of origin, whose themes were consistent sources of memory, imagination and energy  with being nostalgic.

And both responded to the successive art movements of their time, so that contemporary influences are visible in their own works as in a graphic conversation that might otherwise seem derivative. 

Critics tend to valorise 'original' artists whose work is entirely sui generis, but those who reveal their encounters with others tend to offer an equally interesting narrative  for the viewers.   Film art loves to include references, homage, allusion, subversion.