Mitchell • Giddings Fine Arts is honored to present two solo exhibits, Paul Bowen: Woodlark, sculpture fashioned from scavenged seaside material, along with his works on paper, and Space: an odyssey, featuring artist Fran Bull’s acrylic paintings inspired by cosmic imagery from the James Webb space telescope. 

Bowen has centered his life around the ocean, particularly the beaches of Provincetown. As an inveterate beachcomber he collects the humble bits and remains of human commerce, led by his curiosity and appreciation for the random objects forgotten, abandoned and washed ashore. The artist combines and balances his weathered items into carefully realized sculpture, often to be mounted on a wall.

“Bowen is known for working a peculiar magic upon mundane, discarded detritus no one else would even notice. His marvelous constructions emanate a shy lyricism tinged at times with whimsy and always displaying a beguiling balance of strangeness and inevitability. (Christorher Volpe, Studio Visit: Paul Bowen, Art New England, Jan./ Feb. 2021). The same might be said of the artist’s spare prints and drawings, as Bowen removes – “washes away” – all but the formal, stylized shapes, Bowen’s own found objects. 

Paul Bowen, who grew up in a seaside town in Wales, lived and worked near the waterfront in Provincetown on Cape Cod for 30 years. He has always been interested in material 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. His drawings and prints derive their imagery from his environment and he has created his own inks from squid, Xerox toner and walnuts.

His small-scale sculptures, constructed from wood fragments, use limited means such as stacking, piling, and simple carpentry and often appear to float across or torque away from the surface of the wall. He also builds large-scale sculptures, primarily commissioned for private homes and museums, with massive timbers, like those culled from old beer vats and other salvaged sources.

Since moving to Vermont with his wife in September 2005, many of his drawings merge images of covered bridges with wharfs, reflecting his new environment as well as that of the Cape. His new sculptures combine sea-worn wood he has gathered from Provincetown’s beaches with wood from the Wilder Dam in New Hampshire (sometimes chewed by beavers or stained with iron that has leached from surrounding rocks).

Bowen has been a recipient of fellowships from the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Artist’s Resource Trust. He is currently a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, and his work is represented by the Albert Merola Gallery in Provincetown, MA, the Clark Gallery in Lincoln, MA, Big Town Gallery in Rochester, VT and Garvey Rita Art & Antiques in West Hartford, CT. His work is in many private and public collections.

~ Paul Bowen

Website

Paul Bowen is a sculptor, printmaker and master of assemblage from found objects. His work is in both public and private collections, and he has exhibited world-wide in galleries and museums.