Paul Bowen's Artistic Journey from Wales to Vermont and the Sculptural Story Behind His Masterpieces
- Brainz Magazine
- Aug 5
- 5 min read
Written by Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein is best known for his work and achievements in the field of contemporary art. As both a dealer and curator, he has had a long and distinguished career as a New York gallery owner and director, representing an international roster of emerging and mid-career artists. He became the first in-house curator for Microsoft Corp.
The artist arrived in this country from his native Wales in the early 1970s. Finding his way in this new land, he spent those early years between New York and its art scene, as well as his schooling in Baltimore, Maryland. There, he met many artists, including Grace Hartigan, Jack Tworkov, and Salvatore Scarpitta. Eventually, he earned a fellowship at the Provincetown Art Center, and once there, he became a permanent resident in the late '70s of that very rich arts community. Since 2005, however, he has moved to and is now based in Vermont. Like many other artists I know, for example, Jonathan Borofsky and Alex Katz in Maine, and Richmond Burton and Judy Pfaff in upstate New York, he finds the countryside, away from the big city’s expense, noise, and urban grit, a rewarding place to both live and work.
His art dealer, Berta Walker, a mainstay of the Provincetown art scene, explained on her website that Bowen lived and worked near the waterfront in Provincetown on Cape Cod for 30 years. He has always been interested in materials with a history, wood he has scavenged that was once part of ships, houses, salt works, barrels, cable drums, or crates. He has also worked with ships' flags, tar, canvas, rope, and other marine detritus.
For an artist living in the woods of New England, his primary material continues to be wood. His sculpture mostly uses found materials, weathered and storm-tossed. His backyard serves as his supply workshop. A recent writer describes the studio: the upstairs studio walls display the cubistic sculptures for which the artist is well-known, funky, abstract combinations of sea-smooth or tar-blackened pieces of shipwrecks, tide-worn planks and spools married to fragments of pier pilings, honey-colored fish crates, and other mostly wooden debris scavenged from Cape Cod’s shores.
In general, one would describe his work as collaged or assembled wall relief works. Relatively small or medium in scale, each is an intimate composition, unique in character, style, and substance. One will find many references to the sea and boats, having grown up on the Welsh coast and then spending many years on the coast of Massachusetts.
In these works, he melds disparate parts that are unified, brought together, if you will, or orchestrated to create a single harmonious visual solution. Because the scale remains relatively small, these engage the viewer like a whisper rather than a shout. That method of building, shaping, and forming, and the sense of something familiar, is consistent throughout Bowen’s works. His constructions provide the viewer with something familiar because of the wood he chooses to use. The very color, aged texture, and worn nature of the found wood he uses give the work its inviting character, its soul, if you will, so that nothing needs to be added, neither color nor embellishment. His studio, pictured here, shows that multiple works are in process at the same time, the studio wall crowded with wood, while debris lies across the floor, every piece a possible part of the compositions being resolved and worked out. As he collects all these materials, one would imagine the object of attention becomes fixated on a piece and develops a scheme to turn the fragment into a composition, much like solving a puzzle. Parts selected, evaluated, and changed, and soon, a fixed final form appears.
Bowen is part of a larger history of collage and assemblage using wood, from the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters, the Russian constructivists, and, of course, Pablo Picasso, to more recent contemporaries like the mid-century work of another Massachusetts-based artist, Robert Mallary, and also the late Joel Shapiro. While these artists might have addressed issues of Modernism, Bowen is an artist addressing personal memories and expressions that are presented in these three-dimensional collages. I would suspect that many of the images created by these wood sculptures rely on recollections and stories from his youth in Wales, especially when the imagery suggests boats or the sea. For example, the collection of wood fragments and an oar in the work titled Cradle, 2000, recalls summers spent rowing around the Cape, while Sapper, 2017, is an elegant profile of a ship seen years ago in the Bristol Channel.
The personal and idiosyncratic nature of Bowen’s work, like that of Siah Armajani, Jackie Winsor, or Melvin Edwards, is sculptures working outside any established art movements or styles, yet no less engaging and impressive as visual ideas and statements about sculpture, more specifically, sculpture in relief. I would argue this is a particularly American phenomenon, where the individual vision and character of the maker override the pressure of dominant styles and tastes. Each has established formats and methods that they have pursued throughout their careers.
Because Bowen keeps the scale small and intimate, it makes the works even more powerful. Each work is about a recollection; the abstract elements trigger memories and are suggestive of the material's past use: used oars, for example, or faded fragments of blue-painted wood and metal of Blue Boards, 2022, or the disparate wood parts combined to create Sapper, 2017. Like a poet, he seeks the right term to fulfill his vision and idea, hammering these visual phrases and fragments to create the final form. In the case of Sapper, it is several dark horizontal boards that suggest the profile of a boat, with a central mast vertical fragment, and below, a circular element suggests the boat’s rudder.
An earlier work, Rafter, 1988, suggests the timber used to build a roof. Here, it is deconstructed into three elements: the diagonals of the framework, the wooden roof, and the horizontal sections, again referring to the roof assemblages. All these parts are unified to present an elegant, purely abstract sculpture.
Bowen has worked on a more monumental scale over the years, but his heart is with these intimate and quiet assemblages. They are the signature of his well-honed inventiveness. They are distinctively compact, yet filled with visual fervor that is wonderfully engaging.
Read more from Michael Klein
Michael Klein, Owner & Director
Michael Klein's expertise lies in his role as a private art dealer and freelance, independent curator for individuals, institutions, and arts organizations. Today, Michael Klein Arts works with a diverse group of artists, estates, galleries, and non-profit institutions, providing management, curatorial, and other consulting services. At the same time, the company serves institutional as well as private collectors, focusing on developing collections of emerging, mid-career, and established artists. The company also organizes traveling exhibitions both in the United States and abroad.
