One of Provincetown's premiere galleries representing Provincetown Artists and Artists from Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, offering a wide range of styles for all who love art.
Reviewed by Cape Arts Review 2005, Bowersock Gallery Provincetown" Gillian Drake Publisher; Pg 30 issue V.
Cape Arts Review
Bowersock Gallery, is the lifelong dream of Owner/painter Steve Bowersock. The work shown here is eclectic to say the least, ranging from classical sculpture to photo realism to abstract, including the highly colored imaginative paintings of Bowersock himself.
The path that leads to a life as an artist is often not an easy one, as the story of Steve Bowersock testifies. For this young man, growing up on a dairy farm in Bloomfield, Ohio, the choice of being an artist was simply no on the family agenda. He had loved art all his life, drawing and painting when he could, but at the age of 19, instead of going to art school, as he longed for, he joined the Marines, serving in Cuba for a year before shipping out to Iraq during the Desert Storm conflict in 1991. It was while on leave in Italy, visiting churches and museums-"They were awesome," he remembers- that he realized art was his true love.
But he returned to his home town, working in an aluminum mill by day and helping his parents run the farm the rest of the time. His epiphany came when he realized the really hadn't moved forward in his life, in fact, he'd gone backwards, to the way things were before he joined the military to escape the narrow confines of his life. "All there was to do was drink and party," he reflects, adding, "it's still like that now, nothing has changed," He got into his car and drove away from there, heading for New Hampshire and his best buddy's house, a friend from the military. He loved the area and felt he had come home. It was here that he found the opportunity to finally embark on his career in art, signing up at the College for Lifelong Learning affiliated with the University of New Hampshire to earn a degree in art. He took classes at Sanctuary Arts in Elliot, Maine with many different instructors, including Wendy Turner and Sean Beavers, and had a show at the York Art Association in York Harbor, Maine. He then moved to Dover, New Hampshire, and worked for a ball bearing factory during the day and painted at night. "I had to teach myself to shift between the business side and the creative side of my mind," he remembers. "I'd come home from work and would draw blind for an hour or so, or draw something upside down, so I could shift into creative mode."
His work evolved from watercolor to oil, producing what he describes as internal-scapes, which he accesses by plumbing a place of spiritual energy deep within himself. These jewel-colored works of night-time and dawn seascapes, with moons, suns and implied ethereal beings rising up on a cobalt ground, kissed by brilliant orange, yellows and strokes of cadmium red, seem to indicate that the influence of the aluminum mill still buddies up from deep in his imagination, rendering the water a deep metallic blue, the skies furnace-red; or maybe there are distant memories of voyages across the Atlantic on a battleship, with a limitless horizon and dramatic sunsets reflection on a bottomless ocean. "I get lost in an inner world, drawing on strong feelings and sensations, and often I'm so involved I forget time," he says about his work.
The other artists in the gallery hail from Maine and the New Hampshire seacoast, and many of them he met during the time at Sanctuary Arts. The sculptor Christopher Gowell started Sanctuary Arts when she purchased an 1861 Methodist church and created an artists' residential and studio community with an art school and gallery. She has several outdoor sculpture commissions in the city of Manchester and Nashua and shows her finely-modeled sculpture at the gallery. Her work sculpted in clay or was and usually cast in bronze, is shown throughout New England and the Eastern seacoast. Another striking artist is Jeanne McCartin, who crates masks that are as magical as they are challenging.
Painters represented at the gallery include Scott Schnepf, a professor of Art of University of New Hampshire, Dennis Perrin, Darlou Gams, Thersann D' Angelo, Patricia Kaufman, and Dustan Knight, and the Bowersock Gallery offers new shows monthly, throughout the season.
2005 Cape Arts Review "Bowersock Gallery Provincetown" Gillian Drake Publisher; Pg 30 issue V. read more
