Aaron Bowman makes marks. Isn’t that just so callously generic? These marks are the predecessors to paintings. The marks that are made are deliberate and come in the form of sketches and scribbles and doodles and occur on things that will receive them, papery things like hotel notepads, sketchbooks, envelopes, cardboard, and vellum. The marks are lines, often continuous. The favored of these sketches are photographed, then subsequently projected and traced onto a canvas—traced because precisely duplicating the drawing maintains the organic purity of its original, uninhibited marks. Isn’t that just so delightfully theatrical? To reinforce this notion of purity, the lines that are penciled onto the canvas are respected and—throughout the act of painting—stand naked while the oils and acrylics and other mediums make their way around, between, and beyond the linework, blocking-in the composition as if paint-by-number. For the end product, the trace marks remain visible.