Beat artist celebrates life; Michael Bowen's art ranges from profound culture-changing events and the jazz scene to lush island landscapes and Italian villages

Art Business News, Feb, 2005

Raised in wealth in Beverly Hills, educated at Chouinard and self taught from more than 30 years of daily painting and drawing--inspired by life and his own imagination--Beat artist and author Michael Bowen leaves his artistic and philosophic finger print on every major event that defines the epoch-changing 1960s.

Bowen is that personality whose deeds and images form the connective tissue linking Beat ideas on both coasts. Traveling from Los Angeles to San Francisco and from New York to major European capitals--interfacing with John Lennon and Yoko Ono at Tittenhurst, Man Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac at Haight Ashbury--Bowen remains an instigator and innovator of ideas central to art as free expression.

The fertile '60s, synonymous with uncensored creativity, found Bowen starting a career in his native Los Angeles. As events coalesced around Haight Ashbury, Bowen made his way to San Francisco. With artists, writers, poets, musicians of the hippie culture--Alan Ginsberg, Ram Das, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, the Grateful Dead--he was an instrumental force behind the idea that art could and should participate in social change. Beat concerns like civil liberty, ecology, global conflicts, and the artist's role as a voice for change seem remarkably timely today. As Bowen has said in the literally thousands of publications that feature the artist: "Our progress in these areas can't be imagined without the art of the '60s."

The icon event dubbed the "Human Be-In"-individuals gathering at a San Francisco Polo Field in Golden Gate Park with no agenda other than to simply "be," was conceived and organized by Bowen as a show of creative, political, and interpersonal tolerance. Listed in every major publication of the 60s, Bowen's Be-In took place on January 14, 1967, when 20,000 plus people congregated non-violently. The event set the stage for decades of performance and concept art, suggesting the now key idea that art is not just a canvas but can be any act of powerful imagination. The Bowen Human Be-In has reverberated with copycat events in the East Coast, Toronto, and all over Europe for 30 years.

Bowen is also at the hub of Flower Power. He conceived and staged the defining snap shot of a nation in transition: protestors at the Washington Mall placing flowers in the rifle barrels of National Guardsmen. Hoping to turn the Pentagon into an evolving art piece, Bowen purchased and distributed the pounds and pounds of flowers that provoked the image so indelibly etched into our cultural memory.

Bowen's body of art is diverse and accomplished. In his nearly 50-year career, solo and group shows have featured large-scale oil paintings, assemblage, collage, text art, prints, and posters in addition to performance works. His inspiration for subject matter and format comes from rich life experiences; he paints about profound private and social events. The work can move easily from visionary trees of life, where color and line are abstract and electric, to very classically drafted figure studies showing Bowen's keen understanding of the human form. Able to handle realism and loose Expressionism with equal skill, the artist has captured in nearly all media: villages in Italy, lush island landscapes, Hindu mandalas, the jazz scene, heroes of social protest and dozens of doe-eyed madonnas appropriated from every culture he visits.

These works have been featured in hundreds of international shows, are collected by some of the most pre-eminent art connoisseurs and were centrally featured in the pivotal 1996 show on Beat art originating at the Whitney Museum and traveling across the United States. Examples of Beat ephemera by Bowen--from his books on Nepal, to entries for the first counter-culture magazine Oracle, to his famous "Be-In" poster of a sage inscribed in a triangle--are collected and auctioned actively.

Bowen now lives and works with his wife and their 7-year old son in studios in Hawaii, San Francisco and Sweden. Whether in prints or large-scale museum oils, this gifted and energetic eccentric continues to celebrate in art and life those things that make us human: experimentation, creation, growth and change.

For more information, visit www.michaelbowenpartners.com or stop by Artexpo Booth 2510.