Penny Fowler was born in Oxford where she went to School. She began her professional training at Bretton Hall College (Leeds University) at a time when Bretton had achieved a national reputation for Education through the Arts. She gained an overall distinction in her finals. The course gave Penny a rare insight into the importance all the Arts can have in our lives. Simultaneously with practising her own painting Penny began her teaching career. A visiting Art Inspector wrote that Penny’s ‘talent, natural warmth and enthusiasm infected all her students and turned every classroom into a hive of activity and an artist ‘s studio.’ Penny has sustained this contact with teaching including as a Governor at a Cumbrian School.
Awarded an MA by Birmingham Metropolitan University Penny taught Art in three Colleges of Higher Education in which she held Senior Lectureships before becoming Principal Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. While at Brookes Penny gained an award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to further the work of the Gulbenkian Arts in Schools Project. She also became a regular participator in the European League of Institutes of the Arts international conferences.
Penny strongly affirms the positive influence which teaching can have on the practising Artist – the symbiotic relationship between teaching and making Art – an affirmation illustrated in the glosses on Paul Klee’s life and work when shown at the Tate. Klee’s experience teaching at the Bauhaus is cited as an inspiration to the development of his work as an artist.
Penny’s wide and varied output shows the range of her interests. They extend not only into the professional theatre but also an involvement in community theatre, not least the annual production of the Mystery Plays in her former home in the village of Long Crendon. Playing the Virgin Mary for several years in the Butchers’ Play, Christ on the Cross, inevitably informs her approach to painting the The Virgin. (See Madonna of the Black Mountain).
Penny’s Introduction to the Catalogue for her ‘Reason not the Need’ (Paintings from Les Miserables) Exhibition at the Palace Theatre talks about her conviction that ‘There is something increasingly compelling in using live theatre as the subject for painting……’
The conclusion is a powerful statement of Penny’s belief about her work when all the debates about sources and inspiration are ended: ‘At the end the paintings must be judged on their value as paintings alone. They are not something else. They exist in their own right… having disembarked from the history of a great classical expression of a human story in literature indistinguishable from life.’ (Oxlade)
Penny has shown works in several one person shows and a variety of galleries including The New Metropole, Folkestone, The Graves Gallery, Sheffield, Wolfson College Oxford, Christies, The Prince Edward Theatre and the Palace Theatre, London, and Keswick Theatre by the Lake.
Some of Penny’s paintings have been selected and shown by the Royal Academy, including Revolution in the High, Sixties Stripper and The Brothel. Other work is owned by collectors in UK, France, Portugul, Sweden and USA. One is on permanent loan to The Queen’s College, Oxford.
Penny now works from her Studio on Catbells in the Lake District. For several years she had a Studio in the South of France when Provence was the inspiration for much of her work. Having painted from still life, interiors, landscape, theatre, Penny’s work has consciously moved into the digital age, including developing and printing i-pad images. She currently has a collection of over 500 digital works. Penny believes that ‘i-pad art’ is the great new democracy of creativity: “It’s not just Art on a wall, it’s Art to share. It’s inclusive.”
Painting with oils on canvas however remains Penny’s principal medium. Subjects include contemporary and sometimes controversial issues. Meanwhile, she maintains her lifelong interest in theatre as a source of revelation.