My best work happens when I get out of the way and something more luminous and magical than me appears on the canvas. ·
Aia
Bower
Original Fine Art Catalog
Available Artwork
“Aia Bower paints from her studio at the historic ICB in Sausalito, translating the fluid lines of nature and the quiet pull of memory into ethereal, gestural abstraction. Working across oil, acrylic and collage, she builds her canvases in soft, harmonious layers — letting shapes, symbols and half-remembered images surface and recede, the way they do in life. The result is work that is at once vibrant and soothing, inviting the viewer into a world equal parts physical and spiritual.”
— Aia Bower
The Process
Inside the Studio
THE PAINTING PROCESS
Aia paints from Studio 275 at the ICB — the historic Industrial Center Building in Sausalito — with Mount Tamalpais on one side of the building and the Heath Ceramics factory on the other. It's a working artists' community she's been part of for years, and one she opens up for studio visits by appointment, walking visitors through the pieces on the walls and the story behind each one. She works across oil, acrylic and collage, often within the same piece, favoring a soft, harmonious palette that leans toward the vibrant yet soothing rather than the loud. A painting is rarely resolved in a single sitting. Aia builds it in layers over time — one pass of color or texture going down, then another over it, with earlier marks left to show through in places and disappear completely in others. What ends up on the canvas is really several paintings deep, the way memory itself layers over time rather than arriving all at once. Recurring symbols surface through that process without being planned in advance: a nest, a bird, sometimes both in the same gesture — referenced in fully formed shapes or broken apart into something more abstract depending on where the piece is heading. Musical notes appear the same way, as does the lemniscate, the infinity symbol, which shows up in some form in nearly all of her work. She thinks of each finished piece as an expression, an emotion, a dance or a melody — conveyed without describing a literal reality. Aia describes her own process as one of getting out of the way. Her compositions are built from feeling and instinct more than a fixed plan, and she considers a painting finished when something more luminous and magical than what she set out to make appears on the canvas — not before.
