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Born in England, Bowles lived in London for nineteen years before moving to a small town in the northern tip of the Chihuahuan Desert, New Mexico in 2000. This was where he began to cultivate his figurative style. He now lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
"I was looking for a theme that I could tap into easily, something that would get the better of me. One day I read something by Henri Matisse."
"We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought".
Early work shows influences of artists like Paul Klee, primitivism and outsider art. This lead to experiments with rhythm, color and compositions born out Bowles' intense study of tribal art.
Bowles’ work is unique in terms of process and subject. For him, painting is an act of temporal commitment. believing that a concentrated and attentive human involvement achieves a resonance greater than the spontaneous and impulsive. Thus the form is in unsettling contrast to the subject; the moments of raw emotional transitions unique to the male experience. The crisis of a sense of self when the desire for personal exposure and the construction of public identity collide. Moments of sexual ecstasy. discovery, or collusion. The shock of grief for the loss of the unobtainable. His work is at once timeless and contemporary.
John Coltrane's wife Alice was once asked if her husband was alive what would he be doing now.
She quickly replied, "practising".