ROY DOWELL | TWO COATS OF PAINT

Dowell’s paintings have a handmade pizzazz that, at the larger scale, felt a bit like hand-painted 19th-century carnival posters – meant to catch the eye and then intrigue with a whiff of the arcane. “Step behind the curtain and see!” Compressed into a smaller size, the language of pinwheels, checkers, arrows, dots, and dashes resembles the idiosyncratic homemade gameboards that preceded mass-produced entertainment. Indeed, an infectious sense of play permeates the work.

This linkage to the vernacular gives the work a homespun affability. Dowell’s choice of materials lays the foundations for this. He’s used Flashe (“vinyl emulsion paint”) on linen, and the matte paint gives his surfaces the feeling of waxed fabric. In fact, passages in which relatively aqueous paint is lyrically applied over a darker background layer call to mind the wax-resist technique of batik cloth, where loosely painted wax designs stand out against surrounding dye-infused fabric. The mark-making suggests how drawing and pattern design intersect in painted textiles, and how depictions of flora and fauna can go beyond the decorative and serve as a visual structure. Here that quality of drawing is unmoored, so that it’s more free-roaming than descriptive.

Dowell’s motifs no doubt draw inspiration from myriad sources – he has exhibited closely related collage work in the past – but in its gestalt, this body of work feels like a treatise on folk forms. A large part of that is down to his application, which is a pleasing combination of the deliberate and offhand. Visual structures built through repetitive mark-making feel akin to the improvisational space-filling patterns associated with outsider artists. The paintings bring to mind other notable alchemic formulations, such as Marsden Hartley’s embrace of indigenous iconography and abstracted heraldry during his Berlin period and R.E.M.’s transmutation of Howard Finster’s self-taught art into record sleeves in the 1980s. The common quality here is the way that artists go through the world with their senses wide open, welcoming affinities that aren’t in the expected places.

These qualities – a finely tuned sensibility for materials, the ability to be evocative while resisting the referential – are well established in Dowell’s work. The recent paintings are striking in the way that they identify increasingly fruitful ways to deploy these methods. The compact size is working for him here. He seems to be putting more ideas and information into each painting, and in this smaller format those ideas crowd up into a kind of visual jamboree. Without a lot of deep space or “push and pull,” everything is cozied up in the frontal part of the picture plane. The resulting pictures are upfront and all right there, yet also a little inscrutable, thanks to the way motifs interrupt and overlay one another. 

Roy Dowell is a distinguished artist and educator – he initiated the graduate fine arts department at Otis in 1990 – so he’s not coming out of nowhere. Among the great rewards of this show is the opportunity to witness an artist taking his skillset fully to the bank. We’ve all seen good paintings that suggest the possibility of a show that probes even more deeply. This is that show.

“Roy Dowell: Evidence to the Contrary,” Miles McEnery Gallery, 520 West 21st Street, New York, NY. Through October 31,  2026.

Jacob Cartwright —