Kelie Bowman’s watercolor paintings engage the imagination with surreal solutions to our everyday problems of heartbreak, conflict, and despair. In her world, the evil-doers are back-stabbing groups of friends, quarreling family members, and ex-lovers who all get what they deserve in the end. Some battle out their differences by uprooting trees and fencing, while others are taken care of by house-headed heroines who use their chimneys to smoke out the enemy, leaving only a distant memory in their wake.

The paintings have a warm and tender color palate which allows the subtle humor and violence to creep into them unexpectedly, adding a razor sharp edge to their gentle nature. The notion of home is an underlying theme throughout, where a person or merely a feeling replaces “home” as a physical space and in turn becomes one’s foundation in our increasingly transient society.