Mike Bowler

Mike Bowler has a new exhibition running at The Crown on All Saints' St in Hastings, opening on Monday 2 November and staying up until 26 November. It's a local show, and the work is easy to describe but harder to pin down: Bowler paints in acrylic on large-format boards, and his style sits somewhere between realism and surrealism. If you're familiar with the area, you'll know the Crown is right in the heart of town, so it's an easy one to drop into during the day.

Bowler is a local painter who lives in Fairlight with his wife, Trish. He didn't start out as a professional; he took up painting about fifteen years ago, a few years after retiring, and he's fond of saying that his grandchildren's paintings were far better than his. He studied under fellow local artist Mike Funnell and continues to do so, crediting Funnell's skill and patience with getting him to where he is today. That's a good deal of time spent with a palette knife and acrylics, and the large-format boards give the work plenty of room to breathe.

He talks about his process in a way that explains the gap between the realism and the surrealism. 'Just as an author uses words to create an image in our minds,' he says, 'so does an artist use paint to create a scaffolding, on which to hang our imaginations.' It's a fair way of putting it: the paint provides the structure, and the rest is up to you. If that rings true for you, it's worth seeing in the flesh rather than just hearing about.

The exhibition opens on 2 November at The Crown on All Saints' St, and you've got until 26 November to catch it.