04 Sep Artist Spotlights: Rich Bowman

Paintings by Rich Bowman hover in a liminal space between imagination and reality. Though his work is inspired by many landscapes he has seen and photographed, it aims to capture and convey deeply felt emotions, executed in a style that, when pressed for a label, he may term Expressionism or Impressionism — while preferring more emotive terms like “energetic” and “haunting.”

That’s not surprising, considering the artist’s journey. Soon after his birth in Sherman, Texas, back in 1969, his family moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he spent his boyhood reveling in the Midwest’s rolling landscape and dramatic weather. His talent for art led him to earn a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Kansas City Art Institute, where he interned in the studio of professor, artist, and illustrator Mark English — and then continued to work for the artist and his son, the equally esteemed John English.

“You really don’t learn things until you get into the real world, right?” Bowman then gained significant hands-on experience as a staff illustrator at Hallmark Cards, a Kansas City-based company. “I call it my grad school,” he says of his 14 years there. During that time, he also began painting and selling his own fine art on the side and also married Shannon, another Hallmark artist.

In 2005, after a promotion to management left him thinking that he’d rather be painting full-time than living a corporate life, he took a six-month parental leave after the second of his two sons was born — “and I just didn’t go back and gave my letter of resignation.” He’s been painting full-time ever since, continuing to sell through galleries that had signed him up while he was still at Hallmark. “I’ve been lucky to have consistent exhibitions,” he adds.

Blown Away | Oil on Canvas | 32 x 29 inches

Dedicated work, including building an inventory, sustained him and his family when, during a year-and-a-half period amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, Shannon died from cancer. “I took a break from painting to be her primary caregiver. It was horrible, but now I hang on to the gifts from that time.”

Such an awareness of life’s rich yet fleeting blessings radiates in recent works like Early to Rise, inspired by a dawn mountain view during a trip to Colorado. Based on copious photos he took, he developed the composition in Photoshop. Then, he created a 10-by-14-inch study before applying oil paints to his final 54-by-80-inch canvas, executed almost entirely in palette knife, starting with the sky.

High Above it All | Oil on Canvas | 60 x 48 inches

“In atmospheric paintings like this,” he explains, “all the colors have to be united, and since most of the work is sky, that will influence the colors of the ground.” He terms such tour-de-force photo-inspired pieces his “Signature Work,” distinguished from other, more improvisational and abstracted paintings called “Emerging Work,” such as Blown Away. Inspired by poetic Post-Modern painters such as Russell Chatham or Richard Diebenkorn, these allow Bowman to “push the boundaries and be looser, more expressive, and emotional, to force myself out of my comfort zone. I’m constantly trying to explore.”

Bowman is represented by Blue Gallery in Kansas City, Missouri, where he’ll take part in a 25th-anniversary group show, October 2 to November 29; Craighead Green Gallery in Dallas, Texas; Meyer Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he’s participating in a Small Works Exhibition, December 5 to 25; and Bonner David Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona, and New York City, where he’ll have a solo show at the New York location in early spring 2026.

Based in Marin County, California, Norman Kolpas is the author of more than 40 books and hundreds of articles. He also teaches nonfiction writing in The Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension.