Adopting an Abstract Expressionist vernacular since the mid-1960s when he moved to New York, Frank Bowling paints in a unique style that draws from abstraction and his Guyanese heritage. A peer of David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj at the Royal Academy of Art, in London, his earlier work, which includes references to his Guyanese heritage, riffs on the work of Color-field painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. In the early 1970s, he began pouring paint directly from the can onto his canvases. This period heralded his interest in pure abstraction, which he continues to explore, though his titles or color palettes often reference the landscape of his native Guyana.