Experimentation

By Katherine Jentleson

While the High has a work that is dated to 1947, Rowe said that she only began drawing in earnest in the late 1960s, by which time she was living alone and no longer working for her longtime employers. In many of her earliest works, Rowe drew on pieces of cardboard, recycled paper, and other surfaces that were close enough to flat, including a fabric bolt, shoeboxes, and pancake mix lids.

Rowe’s embrace of cast-off materials was grounded not only in the circumstance of scarcity but in a belief in the reuse of materials that has defined the practice of so many artists—trained and untrained—who began making art from everyday objects in the 1900s. Rowe was proud of her ability to transform things that other people discarded, saying, “When other people have something they don’t know what to do with they throw it away. But not me, I’m gonna make something.”

Once Rowe gained access to more paper and pigments from Judith Alexander, the gallerist who began representing her in 1978, her compositions became larger, more colorful, and more complex. She did not plan out her work, instead relying on a free-form process that artists earlier in the century called “automatic drawing” and which she called “following her line.” The sequences of early and later drawings in this section underscore how she moved from focusing on a single figure to complex decentralized compositions comprising flowing and fitting parts.