DO NOT UPLOAD MY CREATIONS ANYWHERE, EVER, IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM WHATSOEVER. DO NOT MAKE COPIES OF MY CREATIONS ANYWHERE, EVER, IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM WHATSOEVER. THIS INCLUDES ANYTHING I EVER CREATED, SUCH AS MY TAPES, TAPE COVERS, PHOTOGRAPHS, CDR COVERS, 7" VINYL SLEEVES, DRAWINGS, PAINTINGS, ZINES, ETC...
The story of Gallerymjb has 4 main chapters;
1. Childhood and Art School 1978-1984
2. New York, Phase One 1984-2003
3. New York, Phase Two 2004-2015
4. Australia 2016-2019
1. Childhood and Art School 1978-1984
My first memory about art is standing in front of the "Chicago Picasso" when I was 6 years old, with my Mom. I was clutching a pack of Topps "Ugly Stickers". The statue was huge, and looked like the rusted skeleton of a winged baboon from outer space. I thought it was cool. This must've been 1968.
I also remember drawing on the sidewalk with chalk, with my sister. I couldn't have been more than 6. She was 11. I drew a circle, and she exclaimed to all her friends that I'd drawn "a perfect circle". Some kind of chemical rush filled my brain at that moment, and I’ve never been the same.
In 1969, when I was 7, our family moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and for the next three years I was dragged around the art museums and cathedrals of Europe, where I saw all the most famous artworks, from the Renaissance masters up to the cutting edge of late sixties modernism. My father didn't realize it, but he'd unwittingly nurtured whatever artistic nature I was born with. Ironic, because later, he was dead set against me being an artist.
In 1972, I was 10 years old, and our family moved back to the US, to a no-name suburb of a no-name town that had absolutely no culture whatsoever. My exposure to art consisted of looking at rock LP cover art, reading MAD magazine, loitering in Spencer's Gifts, and venturing into "head shops" that sold sci-fi fantasy books, weird records and hippie black light posters.
By the time I was in High School, I had developed a habit of smoking pot, and spending hours drawing, whilst listening to prog rock records. I was also trying to play the drums, and I would fumble around on my sister's acoustic guitar. I would draw "fantasy album covers" of the albums I dreamed of one day making. At the time (1978), I thought a good record was one that had good music as well as interesting cover art. "Fragile" by YES is a good example, also Santana “Abraxas”, and Frank Zappa albums with cover art by guys like Cal Schenkel, Gary Panter and Neon Parks.
During this time I acquired softcover art books such as "The Flights of Icarus", a compilation of sci-fi/fantasy art. I also had the Roger Dean book "Views"; "Mythopoeikon" by Patrick Woodroffe; "Occupied Spaces" by Brad Johannsen. I spent an inordinate amount of time at record stores and ‘head shops’, and the artists I liked were guys like Mati Klarwein, HR Giger and MC Escher. Pure lowbrow. I also liked classic 20th Century modernists like Dali, Max Ernst and Magritte. My father had a book called "Civilisation" by Kenneth Clark that had some good art photos in it. Add to that a pile of rock LPs and sci-fi/fantasy books, and I had decided that I wanted to make art. Not necessarily for a living, but for a life.
My father's reaction to this choice was to attempt to talk me out of it. He implied in his lectures to me about my future, that I either did not possess the talent necessary to make a living making art, or that it was not possible to make a living creating art, or that it was not ok with him if his only son was an artist, or that being an artist meant I was gay, etc... this went on and on, and was really horrible. They'd browbeaten me into getting good grades, playing after school sports, achieving my Eagle scout award, but nothing is ever good enough for people like my Mom and Dad. I remember the day they handed me a book. You'd think any good parent would've got a kid like me an art book. Nope. It was called "The Under Achiever".
But like all teenagers, it cemented my resolve to prove to them, and the world, that I was the greatest artist who had ever lived. I hadn't made much artwork, but that was beside the point. My teenage brain had coped with his psychological abuse by creating the delusion that I was a great artist, regardless of whether I'd actually made any "great" art. It was a fact. I was born to it. He'd see.
Oh well. He demanded I go to college "or else". When I said I wasn't going to college unless I went to art school, he called my bluff and said that if I took out student loans, he'd pay the rest of it. This was a critical juncture. At the time it seemed like a better option than working at McDonalds, renting my own apartment on the Concord Pike, hanging out at Bert’s Tape Factory, and making drawings at night that nobody would ever see. In retrospect I should've caught a Greyhound bus to NYC. Instead, I graduated High School in May 1980, and headed off to an expensive and bad art program at a no-name art school (which took me 10 years to pay down).
My art school experience is not worth writing much about. I had a much better experience playing music in arty punk bands during my time there, than I did learning about, or making, art. The one class that was really worthwhile, was a lecture course taught by Larry Bakke called "aesthetics". That's where I learned how to look at art, and how to think about art, and eventually, how to think about what kind of art it would make sense for me to make.
2. New York, Phase One 1984-2003
In May 1984 I graduated art school with a BFA in Illustration, and in August 1984 I moved to NYC. I had $750 that I'd saved from a job painting houses over the Summer, and I was fortunate enough to have a college friend who not only let me move in with him, but who got me a job. He was also an aspiring painter. It was obvious to both of us that, despite our secret notions of greatness, we weren't going to become overnight art stars like Basquiat. I think my roommate was less deluded than me, since he pursued a much smarter and more lucrative day-job path. Plus, he was a silver spoon trust funder, so he didn't need to get famous, did he?
I walked the streets delivering packages during the day, and at night, in our one-room ‘apartment’ that was actually some guy’s garage, I made acrylic paintings using cheap supplies from Pearl Paint on Canal Street. I was also playing drums in an unknown rock band. It seemed like a great life, the life of a real artist, even if I was broke and starving most of the time. The paintings I made were brut, full-color, large-scale (for me and for our apartment... 3 ft x 3 ft) versions of the doodles I was always making. I couldn't bring myself to make a certain type of art just because it might be more "likeable", or "sellable", or more likely to make me famous. As far as making it in the NYC art scene of the time, it was a deadly choice. I dragged my canvasses around Soho, desperately trying to get the Mary Boones and Leo Castellis of the world to look at them, with no success. As a final act of desperation, I engaged in a few "pay-to-play" group shows, where for a couple hundred bucks you could have your art on the wall of a Soho gallery for a month.
The other activities I engaged in at this time was making art zines and handing them out at rock shows; pasting posters around the East Village and the Lower East Side; and spending lots of time at various galleries and art museums. I spent a lot of time looking at famous art and contemporary art. Being a foot messenger, I was exposed to NYC's mid-80s visual stew of graffiti, advertising, street art and shop windows. Eventually I moved into a share house in Nutley, NJ with a rock band, and focussed more on music. I made one painting there, and donated it to a place called The Lizzard's Tail, an illegal squat nightclub/theatre in the then "emerging" neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. By 1990 my painting and drawing activities had stopped completely, and I had become the mailroom supervisor, a much more demanding job than wandering around Manhattan in a pot daze with my walkman on. One day, in 1990, at my job in a mid-town Manhattan hi-rise, a co-worker came up to me and said "hey, that place your band plays at is in the New York Times". I rushed out and grabbed a copy. There in all its glory was my painting, on the wall of The Lizzard's Tail, in The New York Times! Thanks to Terry Dineen, I'd gotten my 15-seconds of fame and I didn't even know it!
I spent the rest of the 1990s trying to improve my financial situation, climbing the work ladder in mid-town Manhattan, whilst commuting from the Hudson Valley every day. I had a primitive recording studio in my basement, and made hours and hours of "indie-rock" recordings. The drawings and paintings were few and far between, and consisted of me chopping up the 1980s paintings to make "recombinant" ones. I eeked out my artwork in various upstate basements, attics and garages. As I was still riding the train into Manhattan every day, to serve out my cubicle prison term, I filled notebook pages on the Metro-North. In various high rise offices, I scribbled away in the margins of legal pads and memo forms. Fortunately I saved these, hundreds of them, and if you suffer through this story to Chapter 4, you'll see why that was a good thing.
In the early 2000's, I got ambitious about making art again. I'd quit my day job, and become burnt out at running my freelance graphics gig. I was also tired of competing with my wealthy first wife, and our marriage was on the rocks. From house to house in the Hudson Valley. In 2000 I became involved in Clark Whittington's "Art-O-Mat" project. Clark took old cigarette vending machines, and turned them into art vending machines. If your miniature art was packaged just right, it would fit in the machine, and plunk down just like a pack of cigarettes when someone pulled the big knob at the row that contained your art. The medium was perfect for my automatic, recombinant modus operandi. Thanks to Clark, I got my 2nd 15-seconds-of-fame when he had an Art-O-Mat machine with some of my art in it, installed at The Whitney Museum in Manhattan. I was finally in a real art museum! I had to go back!
3. New York, Phase Two 2004-2015
In January of 2004 I'd left the Hudson Valley, left my wife and her fancy houses behind, and was living in a tiny apartment above a funeral home on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Things sure had changed a lot since The Lizzard's Tail in 1990. I stood in the intersection of Bedford Ave and North 5th Street, blinking stupidly like some modern day Rip Van Winkel. There was an art gallery on every corner, and the neighborhood boasted of having 100,000 MFA grads moving in every year. It was nice to live in a place that was wall-to-wall dreamers, wannabe stars, rockers, poets, painters, actors, writers, you name it, every type of culture hound had taken up residence there. I spent my days burning through my life savings whilst making large drawings in the apartment. For once in my life I had the time, money and space to draw all day and all night. Again I started making zines and passing them around. I pasted posters up around the neighborhood. Thanks to an old friend, one of my zines ended up in the hands of a gallerist, and she called and offered me a show. Finally! I thought, that's how it's supposed to work. No begging this time, they ask me. Thanks to Emma-Louise, I got another 15-seconds of fame. The opening night, February 2005, was standing-room-only, and unfortunately, ended up being the only proper solo show I've ever had.
I continued to make the large drawings, but the next year or so was a huge letdown. After once again making the rounds of galleries, begging for a show, I decided to give it a rest. I had a new wife, and she was pregnant with our first kid. One thing that had not changed since my first time around, was the fact that life in NYC is ridiculously expensive, and it gets more expensive by the minute. If you're not pre-funded, you gotta have a day job. In 2007, I took a horrible computer graphics job, and figured it'd be 20 years before I'd make another painting.
In 2010 my beautiful daughter was 3, and I was totally burnt out from working 80 hours a week. Constant migraines, to the point where I couldn't see properly. I quit the graphics job, and started once again burning through all the money whilst making large drawings. We'd moved from the tiny apartment to a slightly bigger one, and I could spread out a bit as it were, and make all sizes and types of paintings, drawings and collage. What was also different this time around, is that I'd learned how to sell on eBay. I went about selling my entire collection of 1970s LP records, my art book collection, my teenage coin collection, all my music gear, the lot. Life in NYC was getting more expensive by the minute. Unlike my ex-wife, I didn't have a trust fund. In 2012 I turned 50, and I figured, if I didn't create the body of work I wanted to be known for right now, I never would. For the next 5 years I created a large body of work, 300 really good pieces a year (that's ≈1500 pieces total), of which I sold about half through eBay and Etsy. The art I was making this time was much more dense and elaborate, and seemed to click online with people who like lowbrow, psychedelic, outsider and pop-surrealism art. I had also concocted a pseudonym, "Velveeta Heartbreak". In 2013 I received another 15-seconds of fame, thanks to an article in Juxtapoz Magazine. The downside to being a "lowbrow", "pop-surrealist" or "psychedelic" artist is that the people who like that art, and who buy it, are the cheapest bastards in the world. The new world of showing art online and selling it online wasn't paying the rent, but it bought some groceries.
The new Internet way was better than the old way. In the old days, an artist had to submit expensive 35mm color slides to a haystack of slides, in order to "get noticed". Now my art show even got write-ups! The New York Daily News wrote "large drawings littered with psychedelic shapes and subversive punk slogans". For that same show, the L Magazine wrote "Bowman's approach to large scale drawing draws inspiration from the automatic drawing processes of the surrealists, street art, graffiti, outsider art, psychedelic art, and the art of the insane."
After the rush of reading about myself in The NY Daily News wore off, I decided to publish a collection of my "cubicle prison art”, in a zine series I called "Nova Feedback". Even the zines got a write-up. Lo and behold, another 15-seconds-of-fame thanks to Byron Coley and Thurston Moore, who mentioned them in Arthur Magazine; "a hot bouquet of drawings and collages that range from extremely casual to speed-freak-detailed...some of them have a very ‘50s animation feel to them".
The other great thing about the Internet is that ALL of art is there at your fingertips. Everything from the cavemen up to now. If you are like me, it means wasting even more time looking at millions of artists’ work you’ve never seen before, and probably wouldn’t have ever seen. There were tons, too many to mention here. Being able to turn on the iPad and see their new work every day without having to leave the studio really helped me keep the faith. Plus pouring over tons of art from the past 300 years, in every conceivable style, era and part of the world. It was this “hyper-psych” approach to looking at art that influenced a lot of what I created in the eight years between 2010 and 2018.
Despite the Instagram account, the Flickr gallery, the Picasaweb albums and the Blogger pages, I still went outside and tacked my artwork onto construction site walls (there were plenty in North Brooklyn at that time), and I made physical zines, and handed them around, whilst participating in a few pop-up group shows.
All in all, the period from 2010 to 2015 is the motherlode for my work when it comes to quality and quantity. Who'd've thought my ultimate muse would be my 5 year-old kid?
It's a good thing for my art that I "went for it" at that time, because little did we know, fate was about to obliterate my life as an artist.
4. Australia 2016-2019
I won’t go into much detail about leaving Brooklyn and emigrating to Australia, except to say that it was extremely difficult and tragic. I had to either sell or get rid of everything I ever owned, and we were briefly homeless. My wife developed a rare, incurable, terminal brain disease called Posterior Cortical Atrophy. For the past 3 years I have been caring for her 24-7, and I am rarely able to leave the flat.
One bright spot was that for 9 months during 2018, I was the artist-in-residence at my local council, The City of Port Adelaide. That meant I had a tiny studio to work in, for free, 4 days a week. And I got to exhibit the work in Port Adelaide, and in downtown Adelaide. The guy from the Adelaide Central YHA who got me the downtown exhibit is a great guy, probably the only friend I’ve made in the 7 years I’ve been here. I also had to make a mural for the council. That same year, I was asked by a bigtime US publisher to illustrate the covers for a mass-market paperback re-issue of the Tolkien library. These were things worth calling home about, except my Dad passed away in April 2018. I wasn't able to show him my art success down under, and it broke my heart.
After the show closed in September 2018, I never felt like drawing anymore. Later I had a revelation about why. The guy I was always showing off for was gone.
There's something else I want to make clear, regarding art work vs. illustration work. The only thing worse than being asked to draw something for somebody who is unable to draw it themselves, is having to do it because you are starving. And then the thing you are doing the illustrations for is always more important and more famous than you, or your art. And they never want to pay you enough.
That’s why I always hated being a graphic artist, and I could never be an illustrator, or do murals. They want to see what it’s going to look like before you create it (hysterical laughter). Which translates to, they want it to look the way THEY want it to look, not the way it’s gonna look if I make it. I have no clue what my art is going to look like before I make it.
Trying to make great, famous art, with nothing but a K-Mart notebook and a pile of Sharpies, is like trying to make a great, famous album with nothing but a cassette tape (see Semperlofi).
You know in your heart of hearts that you are never going to “make it”, yet the OCD anxiety always obliterates the common sense, and out come the Sharpies, and hours, days, are wasted drawing pictures. This is how I spent most of my time in South Australia, between 2016 and 2019, before my Dad died and my wife’s care needs took over my entire life. Sitting at the kitchen table, or in Rundle Mall, or at the desk of Fontanelle Gallery where I was volunteering, drawing pictures. Those 500 drawings became the “Hyper-Psych Diaries”.
I had a lot of thinking time on my hands. I didn’t want my artwork to be labelled as some genre that I was never truly a part of. So in 2016 I developed my theory of Hyper-Psych art, which is a fancy way of saying I tried to map all of my influences. They were many, kind of like the way the tons of visual info on the Internet is ultimately somehow linked. It’s an ADHD meets ‘Pure Psychic Automatism’ method of looking at, thinking about, and making art.
I spent many hours at the public library computer, and afterwards, here in our shoebox flat, with a laptop, trying to figure out the best way to present my life’s work on the Internet. It was obvious I was never going make art or music again, just staying alive was getting harder and harder. So in 2022 I decided to take all my art and music down from any Internet places that had ads, fees, third-party payment processors, and/or heavy social media aspects.
I found that the best place for me was the Internet Archive. It’s like uploading your life’s work to the Smithsonian. I like being in there, because everything I ever made is in there, and it’s a library, not a shop. It is a place that respects art, music and literature for the sake of it, not for how much money it might make. They want the stuff to be available to everybody forever, as opposed to the rest of the world that tries to restrict access to culture, in order to make money.
During this process, I had to recoup all of my stuff that I’d jettisoned when the rug was pulled out from under us in 2015. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine was a huge help in this regard. Also, old friends and comrades came to the rescue with scans and files from ages ago.
One big surprise was seeing that some of the art zines I’d made and traded with the amazing NYC artist, Fly Orr, were now in The Minneapolis Institute of Art! Another 15-seconds-of-fame thanks to Fly.
All in all, I think it adds up to about 2 minutes of fame in 45 years. I figure one day, decades from now, when somebody walks one of my drawings into an Antiques Roadshow, some appraiser will end up reading this. And the director of the show will feature my drawing because it is large and garish. And the poor guy who brought my drawing in will be disappointed to learn that he's not paying off his mortgage any time soon. And I'll get another 15-seconds-of-fame.
If you have seen my art and you like it, and you are reading this, and it's still somewhere near 2023, and you have heaps of disposable income, listen up. I need money. There are some really nice, large-scale drawings from 2018, waiting to grace your walls, so if you can add 4 or 5 zeros to the price tag, get in touch: semperlofi(at)gmail(dot)com
February, 2023
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