Born in the Bronx of New York, Roy Dowell is a painter whose work combines abstraction and realism and includes collages that are intricate arrangements of squares, triangles, rectangles, and circles---strongly related to Cubism. Themes of Dowell's mixed-media pieces include late 20th-century mass-media advertising techniques, which are dazzling visual designs that catch the eye with bright colors and busy lines. Hence in his work that combines collage and hand-painted sections there is "the ubiquitous presence of fragments of lettering, design shapes and product photography."

In the 1990s, Dowell began using advertising cutouts, and earlier in his career he did works on paper that were "oddly shaped forms on...