The paintings in Holton Rower’s “Love Heals” compose an amazingly vibrant exhibition of works with incredible color combinations that can be stunningly psychedelic and completely hypnotic. The artist creates the paintings with a simple yet incredibly beautiful process that is carried out with variations in technique that produce wildly different effects.
The technique involves pouring successive quantities of modified paint onto plywood. The paint, sometimes mixed with reflective or opalescent elements, flows slowly and determinedly over the surfaces resulting in amorphous shapes. The works vary from an inch thick to including protrusions called “hats” that extend out by a foot. Other paintings feature “exclusions”, points where the artist placed obstacles that were later removed, forcing the paint to change direction.
Rower directs and collaborates with the force of nature leaving an element of the artistic process to the effects of gravity. The paints are spread at a careful rate in color combinations both highly premeditated and fancifully spontaneous. The designs that result are in part the result of the careful color selections and in part the less predictable result of gravity and the surface force on the material.
