Paul Bowen:
Biographical Statement

I was born in Wales in 1951 and grew up in Colwyn Bay, a Victorian seaside resort. My father was an architect and amateur historian and so much of our family time was spent exploring ancient burial chambers, castles and churches near our home.
I entered art school in Wales in 1968. After a year of foundation studies, I went on to undergraduate studies where I became attracted to the work of artists such as Tapies, Beuys and Dieter Rot. I graduated with a Diploma in Art and Design in 1972 with work that operated in the space between painting and sculpture. At that time, I leaned heavily towards art as process and ritual; archaeological finds and simple, hand-made functional objects influenced my work. I rejected color and anything that was decorative.

I came to the US as a graduate student at The Maryland Institute in Baltimore. I was very interested in abstract expressionism although I had seen it mostly in reproduction. At the Institute, I worked with Grace Hartigan, Ed Dugmore, and Sal Scarpitta, all of whom had been strongly connected with abstract expressionism. Knowing these artists deepened my commitment and seriousness to my own work. In my last year of graduate school, I spent a lot of time in New York exploring galleries and museums and working briefly for Dorothea Rockburne. On receiving my MFA in the spring of 1974, my student visa expired and I returned to Britain to take a position in the department of sculpture at Sheffield Polytechnic.
It was this job that pushed me into making more sculptural work. I focused primarily on wood and learned simple carpentry techniques (what the British call joinery). During this time, from mid-1974 to mid-1977, I commuted from my family home in North Wales. A sense of place became increasingly important in my work as I began to understand how the landscape I grew up in was permeated and shaped by the human presence over thousands of years.

By the spring of 1977, I started looking for opportunities to pursue my own work. During this time, I had a number of exhibitions in Wales, received the Welsh Arts Council Award to Artists and had an exhibition of my work in Italy. Fortunately, I received two consecutive fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. As one of twenty artists and writers, who each received a stipend and place to live and work, I was able to concentrate on my sculpture over two winters. I quickly found a seemingly endless supply of materials on the beaches around Provincetown (located at the tip of Cape Cod). Through the Fine Arts Work Center, I got to know Myron Stout and Jack Tworkov and was lucky enough to receive their critical input. Their seriousness, integrity, and work ethic made a profound and lasting impression on me.

During the early 1980's, most of my work was circular, often using materials found on the beach that I coated with tar or wax. In 1983, I exhibited at Hardison Fine Arts in New York (formerly the Robert Samuel Gallery) in a two man show with Robert Mapplethorpe and before long was exhibiting regularly in New York and elsewhere. Gradually, my work shed the built-up patina and I started to concentrate more on structure and space. The influences were clearly less my Welsh background and more waterfront structures, boats, the Cape Cod light (which some have compared to that of the Mediterranean) and particularly the marine mirages, called "the looming," often seen here in the winter.

Many of the sculptures from the late 1980's were made from the thin boards once used to make fish boxes, which I found washed up near my house. Fragments of the boards were assembled with a zigzag type of joinery into wall pieces and sometimes made into very large structures supported by a heavier armature. To give my sculpture a greater sense of buoyancy and spatial ambiguity, I started to paint the wood with gesso in the 1990's. Before long, the white moved in from the edges and this, combined with areas of black wood, contributed a weighty presence to some pieces, while others, appear to float off the wall.

The fishing boat (or "dragger" as it is called here) remains an icon of the dwindling fishing industry on Cape Cod. For the last eight years, I have used the image of the dragger in my two-dimensional work and recently, its simplified form has appeared in some of my wall structures. It has been interesting for me to move between the figurative image and pure form-a challenge I hope to pursue for some time.