About the Artist
Aia Bower
Aia Bower grew up in Mill Valley, California, and studied Art History and French in the East Bay and in Paris before following a childhood dream to live in Europe. Following in the footsteps of her grandfather — a noted Japanese Abstract Expressionist — she majored in Art History and French Language in college, moved to Paris twice, and eventually found her way to painting. Over more than a decade living and working in France and Italy, she moved close to forty times, eight of those moves international, before coming full circle and returning home to the San Francisco Bay Area. A lifetime of uprooting and letting go of everything known — friends, family, home, culture and all things familiar — has had a profound effect on both her life and her work. Since her return, home, "the nest," and the idea of returning itself have become defining, recurring themes in her paintings. As she's put it: "The comfort in being back in my home town has fueled me to explore what home really means. My work has allowed me to re-frame what 'home' really means. A lifetime of being uprooted, even when voluntary, and letting go of security blankets — friends, family, home, one's culture and everything familiar — has had a profound effect on my work. The ephemeral and fragile nature of living things and the importance of finding grace in each day I'm given are part of the metaphorical engagements that weave through the work." She has also spoken about her working philosophy more broadly: "My experiences and the beauty around me are my sources of inspiration. Glistening light, delicate colors and the feelings that those convey are characteristic themes in my work. I take immense pleasure in creating images that express how ephemeral life can be and lead the viewer to unexpected sensations." Symbolic nests and birds recur throughout her paintings and mixed-media work, referenced in both constructed and deconstructed forms, alongside musical notes and the lemniscate — the infinity symbol — which appears in nearly all of her pieces. Images emerge and then disappear beneath layers built up over time, the way they do in life. Aia now lives in Marin County and paints out of her studio in the historic ICB building in Sausalito, overlooking Mount Tamalpais and the Heath Ceramics factory. She counts Bonnard, Matisse, Diebenkorn and Morandi among the artists who most inspire her. When she isn't painting, she teaches French — taking students, as she describes it, from learning to count from one to ten to conversing fluidly and with passion, work she finds richly rewarding in its own right.
“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.”
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.
