An Artist’s Ego Death: Rowan Foley on How Making Peace with Her Shadow Led to Her Most Honest Work
- 20 hours ago
- 5 min read
What happens when an artist experiences an ego death? For artist Rowan Foley, it meant digging deep and learning to share the spotlight with her shadow.
Sharing the spotlight with her shadow meant letting us into a world that she didn’t fully understand. It meant an honest conversation with herself and acknowledging the fear, the hurt, and the sadness within.
In this conversation, Rowan reflects on her transition toward abstraction, the psychological impact of removing specificity from her figures, and what happened when she stopped trying to make the “right” work.
Selfless Art: Let’s start with a fun icebreaker: If the figure in Green, Folded insisted it deserved exclusive rights, which right do you think it would fight harder for, exclusive color rights or exclusive posture rights, and why?
Rowan Foley: I think I would fight harder for the composition than the color. While this particular piece has a meaning that is heavily influenced by its color, I think I could have used different colors and still made the meaning come across. I am happy I don’t have to, but I think the posture is more integral to the piece than the color.
Selfless Art: Can you share a bit about your background and how you came to be an artist?
Rowan Foley: I think many artists would say, as I do, that I was always an artist; the distinction was choosing to dedicate my life to my art. I made this decision at the age of 17, when I sought out my first apprenticeship with sculptor Colin Lambert, a wonderful artist who lived in Sonoma County, where I grew up. Since then, I have pursued a career in the arts relentlessly. I began working full time as a painter and sculptor in 2023.
Selfless Art: Your earlier works featured actual people, while your latest collection, Delusions and Dreams, moves toward more abstract, symbolic figures. What inspired that evolution, and has it changed the way people connect with your work?
Rowan Foley: I was driven toward this change by the need to remove identity from my figures. I didn’t want the viewer to be wondering who the person in the painting was; I wanted them to see themselves within the figure and allow their own psyche to meld with the emotion and color of the work.
I thought about the way I felt when immersed in a Rothko, or the intense psychological impact of Käthe Kollwitz’s distorted figures and realized that the work I felt the deepest connection to, that I could spend hours looking at, often allowed for a different level of psychological access precisely because it wasn’t grounded entirely in realism. Moving toward abstraction gave me a way to make the figures less specific, and in doing so, hopefully more universal.
Selfless Art: Your figures feel like vessels for emotion. What conversations do you hope they spark within the viewer?
Rowan Foley: With my work, I hope to open conversations for my viewers that they might not expect to experience when going to see art. I want to help my audience think about experiences they have had in their own lives but see them through a new lens and understand themselves from a perspective they may not have considered before. I want my viewers to be able to say, “That is how I felt, but I never knew how to express it.”
Selfless Art: During our initial conversation, you mentioned that moment when you looked at your work and felt something was missing, a realization that led you into an ego death. When you think about that period, what was the hardest part for you: surrendering control, sitting with uncertainty, or giving yourself permission to get it wrong, and why?
Rowan Foley: Surrendering control was definitely the hardest for me, followed by the uncertainty of how to make the work feel “right.” Giving myself permission to get it wrong was actually my way through the woods of my own mind. The pursuit of creating “bad art” became my mantra and my war cry in the face of the anxiety that threatened to take over everything. Whenever I felt myself trying to control what I was creating, I would pause and say to myself, “Let’s break the rules.” It was a kind of mind game, but one that was necessary for me to push through to the other side. It’s also something I still use now to keep pushing myself forward.
Selfless Art: Was there a moment when you realized the ego death wasn’t just about your work, but about how you were seeing yourself?
Rowan Foley: I don’t know that it changed the way I saw myself. My sense of self has always been stable. What changed was my relationship to the approval of other people.
Once I went through that stylistic revolution, I lost some of the easy approval I had received from people in my life. It was hard for my 86-year-old grandmother, for example, to understand my new work and the change I had made. I had to become comfortable making it anyway. I think that taught me to be satisfied with my own approval, even when the people around me didn’t immediately understand what I was doing.
Selfless Art: Fill in the blank: Without realizing it, my work has revealed ____________ about me.
Rowan Foley: Without realizing it, I think my work has revealed that I may have more sadness inside me than I let myself witness. I usually think of myself as a pretty happy person, but when I paint, my work almost always takes on a deep melancholy. That emotion is rarely planned; it emerges as I work.
When I began planning In the Hall of Ma’at, I was originally inspired to create a painting of a woman joyfully frolicking. But as I continued working, the piece morphed into an exploration of the complicated experience of weighing one’s own morality when confronted with different experiences of reality.
Sometimes paintings seem to know what they want to become, and the control the artist has over them may be more of an illusion than we think.
Rowan Foley’s experience with ego death shows how much can change when an artist stops trying to control the outcome. Her movement from realism toward abstraction became a way of questioning what she wanted to say, what she was willing to reveal, and how much of herself she was willing to let enter the work.
There is something beautiful and rewarding about making peace with your shadow rather than trying to paint around it. For Rowan, that willingness has opened the door to some of her most compelling work, where abstraction, color, posture, and psychological experience come together in ways she could not have planned from the beginning. Her work highlights that there is beauty within some of our darkest moments, and within that beauty lives a universal connection between all of us.
To see more of Rowan Foley's incredible work and stay updated on her latest projects, be sure to follow her on Instagram and visit the her website.
DISCLAIMER:
The personal views, opinions, and perspectives expressed by artists featured, interviewed, or presented on this site are solely those of the respective individuals. They do not reflect the views, beliefs, or opinions of Selfless Art Gallery, its staff, or affiliates.
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