Penny Fowler went to school in Oxford . She was fortunate to begin her professional training at Bretton Hall College in Yorkshire at a time when that College achieved a well-deserved national reputation for education through the arts. After taking a Master's degree at Birmingham she taught in Higher Education becoming Principal Lecturer in Art at Oxford Brookes University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Penny now lives in the Newlands Valley, Cumbria, working from an award-winning studio on Catbells.

Her most recent one-person show, which focused on Landscape, was at the Keswick Theatre by the Lake . While this exhibition was a departure from much of her earlier work which concentrated on still life and performance, showing in a theatre was not a new experience. Two of Penny Fowler's previous one-person exhibitions were held in West End Theatres while the shows were still running – Martin Guerre at The Prince Edward and Les Miserables at the Palace. Penny's work deriving from live performance has been shown at Christie's in the Garrick/Milne Prize Exhibtion and also selected and hung at the Royal Academy Summer Show.

Penny has exhibited in various galleries outside London , including The New Metropole Folkestone, Graves Gallery Sheffield, Viridian Gallery Keswick and Wolfson College Oxford. Her work is owned by collectors in England , France and USA .

A Painting is first and foremost a Painting

There have been many appreciations of Penny Fowler's work. Here are some observations by the painter Roy Oxlade: ‘Penny Fowler's work belongs to that part of the tradition of painting which is its central core: that which is concerned with resemblance, the magic of transformation. As metaphor the completed painting is the embodiment of human feeling, the revelation of what Fowler calls ‘our natural aesthetic.' …. She says, ‘arranging through feeling is something very precious that we all possess.'….. The outward subject matter of her paintings has been for many years completely orthodox. She has painted and drawn the things and people around her; an admirably straightforward perceptual encounter, an exchange between the fruit on the dish and its metaphorical life on canvas…….The relationship between the physical world and the disinterested play of raw materials conjured into form by the painter is fed in Fowler's case by a highly discriminating eye. Drawing is vital to her both in itself and as an integral part of her paintings……Figuration, resemblance, portrayal, narrative, representation; whatever nuance each may seem to offer as a description of such paintings, she accepts the responsibility that a painting, whatever else it may convey, is first and foremost a painting answerable to the demands of painting.'