Dean Bowen: Flourish

 Why, as I have observed recently while in an art-endowed public space, does Dean Bowen’s art stop people in their tracks — whether they be young or old and of varying interests and ethnicities? Firstly, his sculptures, paintings and prints are unique. Although related in numerous ways to other instantly effective works of art created over the ages and employing animal imagery, there is nothing quite comparable with Bowen’s work and it has an immediate tendency to lift the viewer’s spirits.

Secondly, the works are beautifully executed. Now an internationally acclaimed artist, Bowen has spent decades maintaining the highest levels of studio practice. His mastery of techniques, along with a powerful use of colour and meaningful choice of imagery, invests his processes and materials with qualities that capture the viewer’s attention while stimulating the imagination. He takes inanimate materials and brings them alive. It is this spirit of life, or anima mundi, that is the essence of Bowen’s art, as it has been to varying degrees in the notable art of most cultures dating back to deep antiquity.

Although Bowen’s entire repertoire of imagery is broader, in the works chosen for this exhibition his subjects are birds, animals, people — even insects — along with simple shelters occupying zones of earth and sky that exude an atmosphere of well-being, warmth and affection. Highly abstracted and possessing distinct personalities, his birds and animals may be playfully reminiscent of the animated human, bird and animal identities of children’s books and films that continue to occupy the psyche throughout one’s life. However, beyond individual experience, Bowen’s images have a timeless ancestry extending back into cultures where art was humanity’s primal means of connecting with those mysteries of life that elude us to this day. I have come to think of his art as an attempt, consciously or not, to re-capture and extend the visual impact of that animus or animating spirit which is essential to all life. This enterprise has been shared by many cultures that have recognised and used the power of art to awaken the senses and provide re-assurance in the hope of communicating with forces beyond human control.

Think of ancient Egypt and other civilisations whose art and architecture is replete with representations of birds, animals and significant human identities, often combining them in ‘animistic’ sculptures and other artefacts in a quest to understand and influence those vital life-forces, or mana, that remains fundamental to human life.

In the first chapter of his book, Totem and Taboo (1972), Sigmund Freud outlines consecutive eras of human development. The first, the animistic, was common to less evolved societies with their dependence on magic, ritual, and artefacts expressing the mana, or life-forces, believed to be shared by man and beast. Next came religion, philosophical thought, and scientific discoveries. Our era, right now, is technologically driven — man and machine rather than man and beast. But a sense of the animistic cannot be erased from our mental history and emerges in the works of artists like Bowen whose seemingly simple birds, animals and humble dwellings, with ladders reaching to the sky or heart-shaped plumes of smoke issuing from their chimneys, are expressions of hope and love in the face of that which remains unknown.

Musing over the items in this exhibition I have asked myself why people become spell-bound by a simple, almost oval not quite circular, field of delicious colour endowed with minuscule eye and beak, or a roughly semi-circular shape with spiny quills and horizontal underbelly? All Bowen’s works, whether three-dimensional or two, are firmly grounded — on earth, sturdy plinth or strategically placed feet. The human heads, with frontal gaze, are also oval and the horizontal emphasis is replicated in their outstretched arms. There is geometry at work here and this is another universally recognised primal element to which humans respond — whether intellectually or instinctively.

In Bowen’s art references to bird families, the egg shapes within the birds’ bodies and their friendship and protection of the insects on which they depend can be seen as symbolising the need for human and animal life to continue to flourish — and the importance of art and artist in this endeavour. We are reminded that in shamanistic belief the bird, with its ability to fly — which humanity lacks — was regarded as a messenger between earth and the inaccessible beyond. Given the frailties and incapacity of humans in their dealings with the unknown, birds became endowed with responsibilities, and, like Dean Bowen’s art, they bring us joy!  — Jenny Zimmer, Arts Writer