Paul Bowen sculpts abstract compositions from
scavenged quotidian objects. His eye for form exceeds
our ordinary familiarity with his materials—discarded
barnwood, embroidery hoops, or cable spools. He
at times treats his material accumulations with paint,
inlay, the application of tar, or a driven nail. Bowen
will on occasion purchase materials for his work, such
as old redwood boards from beer vats that he used
for a commissioned sculpture at the Cape Museum
of Fine Arts. The moniker of “found object artist”
seems too confining for Bowen and he doesn’t feel
that it describes him accurately. At the same time, he
identifies closely with the history of objects and seeks
to use them as symbols of their original purpose or
their cultural origin, though they are unmistakably new
and original objects that ask the viewer to question
the materials themselves as they contemplate the new
form.
Bowen often crafts his texture-driven work on a large
scale, though not exclusively. He started as a painter
at Newport College of Art in South Wales using tar
and gesso for their textural, visceral affects in their
application on sheets and tarps. Found objects played
a role even in his earliest artistic pursuits. Upon
sourcing his materials, be they harvested from sea,
river, or junk pile, he likes to live with them and to
“build a relationship” with them in order to explore and
extrapolate their tactility. “It’s like a dance,” he says.
Bowen was born in 1951 in a small seaside town
in Wales. Having grown up shortly after the Second
World War in a family that used coal heat and had
no refrigeration or telephone, he acquired a ‘waste
not, want not’ approach to objects. His father was an
architect who very much enjoyed driving around the
Welsh countryside with his wife and children once
his stint of diffusing bombs during the war was over.
Bowen’s sensibility reflects his father’s interest in
construction and his love of exploring abandoned
mines and quarries, battle sites, old churches, and
farmhouses.
Bowen attended Chester School of Art in Chester,
England in 1968 and he studied with Joseph Bueys
at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He also attended the
MFA program at the Maryland Institute College of Art
in Baltimore. In 1977 Bowen was a fellow at the Fine
Art Works Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts
where he settled. He and his wife, the writer Pamela
Mandell, moved to Williamsville, Vermont in 2005 after
exploring there when he was the Artist in Residence
at Dartmouth College. Bowen’s work is included in
many public and private collections including at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Fogg
Art Museum at Harvard University, Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston and others. He has taught at Mount Holyoke,
RISD, and others. Bowen currently lives and works in
Williamsville, VT.