Michael Bowen: Life is very groovy

Michael Bowen in Stockholm. © Carl A 2006

Michael Bowen (1937-2009) was one of those cosmic protagonists who seem to always be at the right place at the right time. Someone constantly charming the gods to bestow blessings upon blessings, and installing foundations for a good life wherever he may end up. Out of his affluent Beverly Hills’ life in the 1940s, Bowen drifted into the vibrant 1950s art scene around Wallace Berman and the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Among other things, Bowen worked as Ed Kienholz’ assistant. While helping Kienholz assemble his great pieces, Bowen was also developing his own style of painting.

Immersed in esoteric philosophy and in his own naivistic but forceful paintings, Bowen hung out with beatniks in San Francisco and, a decade later, was a proto-hippie who helped manifest the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park in 1967 (and many other historical events). Together with Allen Cohen, he published the legendary underground paper the San Francisco Oracle, which was instrumental in spreading the radical hippie gospel. Remember the famous press photos of hippies stuffing soldiers’ guns with flowers at a peace rally by the Pentagon in Washington? The thousands of flowers were bought by Bowen, to spin the ”flower power” concept he had helped coin in San Francisco onwards.

From there and on, Bowen lived a nomadic life in America, Asia and Europe. Strangely enough (or not), towards the end of his life he wound up in a suburb of Stockholm with his family and a small entourage. He painted away and gladly talked about his art and his life experience. At the time I dropped by to see him, he was suffering from severe back pains. Morphine seemed to help out a bit, but this also affected his focus a great deal. He would often drift away into another ”zone” and then come back and carry on where he left off. Or perhaps this was just the self-styled magician checking out some parallel universe while at the same chatting away about art and life?

No matter what, Michael Bowen died in Stockholm in 2009. I’m very happy to have met a man who was instrumental in many great counter-cultural events and happenings in those explosive decades of contemporary American history. What follows here is a transcript of our talk on November 17th, 2006.

What attracted you to painting specifically in the beginning?

I was interested in drawing and painting since the age of six. I was never interested in anything else at all. My father was both a doctor and a dentist. He kept his office in Beverly Hills and the house there as well. He was also known as what they called in those days a “Sportsman”. Meaning he owned a few great old prizefighters, had a pleasure boat he and his Hollywood friends would go on to fish, drink, and party with each other. He also loved airplanes and had two of them that held about eight people each. I guess I was an original “Beverly Hills kid”. Your question “What attracted you to painting specifically in the beginning?” is a complicated yet simple question for me. Everything attracted me. Now as then I want to know everything I can about everything I see. As for painting or assembling things from my experiences, I have never done anything else.

Your question really is a funny question for me. The idea makes me want to laugh. In fact, I am laughing as you can see because such a funny question is so often put to me. The truth is that I have never done anything else in my life except create art. But I don’t mind this funny question, because it reminds me that I am talking to you now rather than working on the big painting on the easel behind me. And I like to talk with you. It is like a little vacation. Usually I become so absorbed in my work that I don’t really care much about anything else. I could spend 24 hours out of the day just painting in the studio or anywhere. And this kind of studio action is not like work at all yet I suppose it seems like very hard work to the few people who see me paint. Only when my body tells me it is tired do I understand that making art is actually definitely hard work. I make these images because I have to. If I did not I would go nuts. All these images crammed in my brain with nowhere to go would be torture. Very exquisite torture, which I would not care for. The very few times I could not work for a day were awful.

If I painted only for money, I would be one of the thousands of commercial artists.  There is a huge difference between a fine artist and a commercial artist. My interest has always been in the fine arts. van Gogh and Gauguin believed that somewhere in the world there was purity in people untouched by civilization. I do not believe that. I think that there is purity in everyone, everywhere. And that this purity can be found by the people themselves. I paint pictures because I am driven to paint. I like to record what is around me. Sometimes I become interested in my own work long after I made the picture. My observation at the time I made the work has become deeper than my awareness of it at the time I made it. When I see the picture later, it might even turn out to be prophetic.

There is a poster over there in the corner of the studio from a show in Italy in 1998. It’s a painting called Eurabia. It was created because when I came to Florence from our villa above the city I liked very much to have Cappuccinos and sit and watch the people in the Piazza de la Republica in Florence. While I was having coffee, drawing and thinking, I would watch the people in the Piazza. I felt like an art spy while I recorded what I was watching. It didn’t really dawn on me what it was that I was actually seeing until later in the studio. Then one night I picked up a magazine from America with a piece by the journalist Oriana Fallaci. She had moved to America because she claimed Europe was being cleverly re-invaded by Muslims. I looked at the painting and there it all was. In the picture are the black people from Africa running from the cops because they were selling cheap sunglasses on the street. They looked like beautiful gazelles running in herds from the cops on horseback trying to catch them in the crowd. The handsome Carabinieri could never catch them. The Africans disappeared like genies into their hidden bottles. There were many people in Western clothing but you could tell clearly that it was a Muslim family. There were many of these people in the crowds I was watching. When I saw Oriana Fallaci’s statement, I realized what I had painted. In this way the painting was titled. After the fact, not before it. That seems to be the way I work. I usually do not think before I make a picture.

You started out early with your vocation.

Yes. I always went to private male only schools. Almost all Military Academies. If I was caught drawing I was punished, usually beaten. I kept right on drawing anyway. So much for the paper tiger of authority. They have no power unless they have your mind and/or your body under their control. Even then, they can always be conquered. I feel I am a living example of that great lie they spread about themselves.

Were you eager to show your stuff to others early on or was it more like a cathartic process for you personally?

I wanted to show my art if it was an easy and simple process. I have never been interested in scrambling after a career. For me, that is a low thing.  If it comes to you and you help it out, that is OK. We have to make a living somehow. At the same time, I am not a studio painter. I like to travel around the world. If I would like to get enough to get a ticket to go somewhere to live there long enough to paint something then I project for it. I put it in my mind as a thing already done. Then I do not wonder about it – I just let it cook. Eventually the law of probability produces the ticket and anything else you need. All great yogis know this and they pass it on. I am a lucky person from that point of view. But then I have had great teachers.

If I may say so, I am not someone who sits in a studio trying to find out what the next fashion’s going to be. I have never done such a thing. However I don’t want to make an attack on the art world. It is attackable enough. Besides it is boring and not worth it. The bottom line of commercial galleries is money of course.

I have had people who have shown my work and have discovered that some types of my work will sell faster. They would come to me and say ”Look, why don’t you paint this some more?” The first time I ever heard that, I was so shocked I got drunk. And drinking is something I really don’t personally care for. I had a show in San Francisco and there were many people there. This was after the Beat period. The Beat galleries did not care at all about this bottom line money horror and that is why they are famous today and the others forgotten. I could not believe anyone would ask me to do such a thing. To paint another painting like the one that had sold. I might do that if I wanted to, but not for money reasons. I told the dealer that I just could not do it. He asked me if I was unable to copy my own work. That shocked me even more. In addition, it really pissed me off. He asked me the same question again. I just got up and walked out. I picked up all my work at his gallery that day and never spoke to him again.

Bowen at work, Saltsjö-Boo. © Carl A 2006

Do you think you were affected then by the attitude or integrity of Kienholz?

No. Those people were very interested in making money. Not Wally Berman or people like that. Ed Kienholz and others, yes. I don’t want to give a lot of names. But it was great that Ed did that. There would be no powerful form of assemblage art if it had not been for him. There is no question about it. He may have been an automobile salesman who stumbled into a bunch of Bohemians in LA... At least that’s the way it all began for him, but what matters is that he discovered a way to express what he saw. And what he saw America needed to hear and see. I lived with Ed when I was 16  and 17. We paid $7 a month for our place. An old ceramic studio behind Dutch Darrin’s Auto Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, a block from Barney’s Beanery where we all hung out. The mental hospital piece in Stockholm’s Modern Museum… I helped him make that, in the sense of screwing and glueing things together.

As far as money, me and LA is concerned, I had just run away forever from Beverly Hills, the place half the world wants to live in or at least smell or hear about. So Ed’s friends, great artists that they were, mostly came from backwater America. I couldn’t really blame them for wanting a piece of the pie. American pie. But I already had my fill of it. What these guys did between themselves was perfectly understandable. The fact that they sat down and figured out among themselves that ”We’re artists, we’re broke, we’re going to make it financially and we’re not going to depend on some lying art dealers for our future. We are going to work out a process by which we help each other quietly. And we’re going to advance that way, very quickly like a Blitzkrieg through the art world.” And that was exactly what they did. And that is exactly why I left Los Angeles!

I was just a kid and I was watching this bunch of people doing the most fantastic things I had ever seen in my entire life. And they were sitting there plotting how to take these incredible things into a whole other world. The world of money and crooks I had just escaped from. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a business thing that they had to do or they would just die on the vine like grapes in a blistering sun. However, to me, there was no romance in it. 500 miles north, there was a city of romance. I knew about it because I had gone there with my mother and her lover when we weren’t visiting Las Vegas, where he was building The Flamingo Hotel and Casino (the mother’s lover was noone less than the iconic underworld entrepreneur Benjamin ”Bugsy” Siegel/ed.). We used to drive to San Francisco and that is when I first discovered that the projection of a kind of fairyland was real. I was only eight years old then and I was drawing then in San Francisco. I did some of my first drawings in the bar of the Drake Hotel. The Drake was the “in” place to stay with the Sportsmen crowd when they came to San Francisco. The Drake Hotel is still there, still shiny and fabulous. Those were the days when an eight year old boy could wait all day if he needed to, drawing pictures on the table in the plush leather seats of the Drake Tavern.

What about the interest in esoteric matters? Where did that come from?

My grandmother was an early member of the Theosophical Society. The Society set up their headquarters organization in Madras, India, and then in other places over time. One was a very beautiful property in Ojai, California, just south of Santa Barbara. They put together beautiful properties and their whole interest was in the esoteric meaning behind metaphysical thought and modern art. I was fully involved with that. There was no religion in any part of my family. We are not genetically or racially religious. My family was not even atheist. However, my grandmother was extraordinarily interested in the question of how this miracle happened.

How did we get into this situation? The situation is very simple. We are alive in bodies. If that is not a miracle, I do not know what is. It was difficult to attain, because I was not with my grandmother every day. It was hard to get to be with her. I was with her as much as I possibly could from the time I was a baby. I saw things from the point of view of the Gita, the Mahabharata and other literature as a child. Later on in life, I discovered the same things I had discovered already as a baby. It all started to make sense. Sometimes when people write about my work, they call me a ”mystic artist”. I am not really a mystic anything. I have come to believe that there is something called magic. That is when things happen and everything just is. You can take it apart, have all kinds of ideas about it, and even mystify it. Maybe they should describe me as a mystified artist?

To be a mystic artist would be almost a paradox. For a mystic everything should be contained.

Yes, I think that is valid.

When were your esoteric interests consciously included in your art?

Usually in times of crisis. Always in times of crisis. There is always crisis. You think everything is going along just smoothly and then some weird crisis comes along. It comes from the left field. During times of crisis, you become more metaphysically oriented or aware. It is like people walking in a daze. They are hit over the head but cannot remember it. It is like amnesia. We do not remember what happened before we took our first gulp of air. Someone took us out of the inside of the body of somebody else. We were mixed together in that alchemical container, the womb. So then, you can get out safely with a little help. You get some air, air that exists around this tiny planet. The planet is like dust. If you look in a telescope, you really see spots of dust called planets and galaxies. On this particular spot of dust that we are living on there is this tiny layer of stuff that we have to gulp right away. The miracle has given me a voice box that has the right bones so I can push my face around so that it pushes the air out again and so that I can make a word. It travels across the space-time across to where your ear is, which another piece of machinery is ready to receive information. It really is very slow.

But it works.

Art works faster but yes, it works. It works for now. However, it does not work in outer space. When we get off this planet and believe me, brother, we are leaving... As the Tibetan lamas have been telling us for a long time, everything is impermanent. Now we have built machines that go around the earth and have great eyes. It can send us back images and we know that stars are born and stars collapse. We now know that everything is as impermanent as those Tibetan lamas have been telling us for 2500 years and other people too before that. However, no one believed it. The scientific accuracy of it all is that we are living in an impermanent reality. In death, there is oblivion, nothing else. All over. That means that this situation right now cannot be happening. Because what formed it? One can just go on forever like that... Our consciousness is permanent. It is unborn. It has always been there. That thought process ends up in my paintings. You can start that thought process from the simple fact that you have to breathe air outside of a womb, which is created for you to be mixed and grow in. Every single one of us goes through this. So... Here we are. And that’s it.

I agree! While we’re on the subject of impermanence... For you as an artist, what has been your major development? Is it mainly stylistic or having to do with content?

That is a big question for an artist. It’s basically saying ”Can you draw better now than when you were nine years old?” It’s also saying ”Do you have anything to tell anybody that’s more intelligent than when you were 12 years old?” The answer to both questions is no.

Nevertheless, there is also a yes, because what happens is that I have become able to get across what I knew was true when I was 14 much better now. As far as being able to draw something or build something, the same is true. The more you practice it, the more proficient you become, the more subtle you become and more aware of other people’s consciousness. You get better at getting a point across. In my life there are points that stand out. Some are so strange that I hesitate to talk about them. Others are so simple that they sound strange in their simplicity. Here is an example. My life as a child in Beverly Hills was miserable from the point of view of being a child. However, from the point of view of having things like Cadillacs crowd your driveway and have people make your clothes by hand and black people who are there to clean your shoes and your house, weed the flower beds… That was the world to me in those days before the new worlds were discovered with their infinite possibilities. The memory, at least when it doesn’t wake me screaming as a nightmare, I sometimes call “Long ago in Beverly Hills.”

Anyway. One warm, hot day I was feeling very alone. More alone than usual. I walked up in the Hollywood Hills and I decided to give myself to the universe. It sounds very childish and simple.

I think it sounds very mature!

I almost feel embarrassed when I try to relate it now. I went up there. I took off all my clothes. If someone found you naked in those days, you would end up in the madhouse. I lay in the sun and spread my legs and arms out like the da Vinci-drawing. And I gave up. There is not much you can say about that. That was all there was to it. After a while, I got up, got my clothes on and wandered back down to Sunset Boulevard. Then I went back to the house with the black people who were just waiting to do nice things for me. I did not know anything else back then. But it was not long before I discovered jazz and I discovered real black people. I discovered that they lived actually lived somewhere except on a bus. All I knew was that they got on a bus in the morning and came into Beverly Hills and my house then later they all walked back to the bus stop and went somewhere. This went on day after day. I escaped with the black people one day on the bus. I had never been on a bus. Somehow, I got to Laurel Canyon and the artists. I was happy about that. I’m still happy about it.

Things have changed. However, in an impermanent world, this is to be expected. People are still causing suffering for each other. Unfortunately, they have not realized yet that this is not a good thing to do. Again, we have the Tibetan lamas or the Christian saints or whoever... Saying there is suffering and we all experience that. Why? Let us try to not keep that up. Then you think about peace and what is peaceful and then you read about people hurting each other and causing horrible suffering. This is foolish and unnecessary and I hope my paintings reflect that. One cannot expect truth to be understood by very many people. Nevertheless, you can project for this to happen. Some of the people who caused suffering for other people are called heroes. This is insane and I try to show this in my art I hope. Other monsters are called saints. It is unfortunate. The least suffering possible is the best thing.

"Maybe they should describe me as a mystified artist?" Photo © Carl A 2006

Is it possible for you to define your art?

That’s very difficult. It’s hard for me to define it. The paintings are very different. 

How much of your work would you say is talismanic?

Every bit of it. But I’m not sitting here making talismans. People keep telling me that they see something new all the time. The most common thing I hear from people that have my work is that it changes all the time. People see things and they ask me about things that are talismanic. Many people have for some reason found something in my work that they happen to have experienced. They feel they have a bond with the picture. They feel that something is living in the picture. Moreover, these people are not crazy. They ask me what it means.

If it is of any help in understanding my work you can know that I am very familiar with Tarot cards. My mentor John Starr Cooke taught me about the real esoteric aspects of Tarot, beginning in 1960. I can see that in my work. When one uses a tarot deck, one is trying to get some kind of answer from the cards. That is not why I paint pictures. Nevertheless, it is the same thing in a way. When people come to me with questions that are really for the tarot that puts me in a kind of spot. I definitely do not want to be anybody’s guru. The only thing I want to be against is suffering. 

The Tarot is a very systematised and esthetic tool. Art and paintings affect through estehtics. Do you think the human mind needs to be opened up by, for instance, art in order to be able to perceive something higher and deeper?

Definitely. When there’s a war usually the first thing that happens is that the art is protected so that it doesn’t get blown up or broken or stolen. Why does anyone protect the art that’s on cave walls? Because it’s valuable to us. It’s the key to the unconscious and, beyond that, to the connective unconscious. Jung was a very smart dude with his collective unconscious and he was close to coming up with the connective unconscious. As a race and through machinery we’re developing a connective unconscious. Computers and the Internet are parts of that. It’s a precursor to the connective consciousness, where you have accurate communication. It’s much faster to go from brain to brain. Ingo Swann is an interesting guy in that respect. Uri Geller is another guy I know from correspondence. To a degree, we communicate. He does not fully know yet what is happening to him.

It is all coming about and it has to do with evolution. We are evolving because the life-force wants to survive. Lamas and other people have known the truth for a long time. In fact, in the 60s a bunch of hippies knew the truth. They told the truth but they were weird so nobody wanted to believe them. 30 years later, it is a different story. I illustrated a magazine 30 years ago telling exactly what is going to happen to the planet if we don’t stop screwing it up. Now we are at the point where they’re all hysterical about climate change. They should have listened to the freaks back then! The people didn’t act or look like the average people so they just didn’t believe them. The life-force definitely wants to continue on, so it’s building escape pods. That’s what the space process is all about. The Internet is another thing. Remember Benjamin Franklin and his experiments with conducting electricity.

My friend John Lilly experimented with implants in the brain. The scientists back then did not care about how the monkeys suffered during the experiments they conducted. Lilly developed a painless way of inserting implants in their brains. It is all part of a gigantic life-force attempt to maintain itself and to live. Life is a very wonderful thing. It is very groovy. Suffering or no suffering, it is just very groovy. The way it is moving right now is that there is a lot of fear among people deep in their psyche. People have fear because they did not believe the freaks. They did not listen to the people they should have listened to. Now, they have to catch up. My paintings are about that too. People should carefully pay attention to my paintings. They should examine the stimulation they experience and they should activate their own creative power.

Speaking of catching up... All of the things you’ve been involved in – the Beat thing, the flower power thing – these are all mementoes, leaving things and traces for people to catch later... One couldn’t demand at the time that everyone should get it. Everyone wasn’t on acid, for example, although many were.

You did not have to use the drug. It was a question of sympathetic feelings. Of feeling for other sufferers. Flowers are among the most beautiful things that this planet produces. Yes, I did call press conferences and we were facing the dilemma of how to tell these hardened reporters about this next thing that is going to be really impossible for them to understand. We were not going to demonstrate against things we hated. We were going to celebrate life. But they were never going to understand that. The only way to do it was by using a different strategy. I had a press conference set in San Francisco, about the Human Be-In. What to do?

One beautiful morning after a fun, playful night I woke up. The sun came through the window and it hit a little flower that someone had put in a little glass. It was absolutely the most exquisite thing I’d ever seen. Then I knew immediately what to do. We got as much money together as we could. We all went out and got as many flowers as we could. The people from my house came back with bushels of flowers. When the press conference came, all these cynical, hardened reporters came up to Haight Street. There were so many beautiful girls there, their arms full of flowers. They were placing them everywhere. Every reporter was handed some flowers. What are you going to do? You see these hippies and you do not know where their heads are at. So you suddenly have these flowers in one hand and your notebook in the other... The whole room smelled so magnificently. It was just an incredible weapon of love. That did it. The reporters wrote about”flower power” and about how dumb these fools (us) were. However, what they did not realize was that they were doing what we wanted them to do.

Then there was that other photo with flowers going down the rifle barrels. I had gotten $500 worth of daisies in Washington, DC. There was a terrible war, millions were killed. That was the point of the demonstrations in general, to protest. Soldiers were treated really badly. I observed all that during the war. I hated to see it. Due to a complete accident, I found myself in a position of responsibility in Washington at the demonstration. We had done it in San Francisco with the flowers, so I thought we should do it here too. I thought those rows of soldiers with their guns half-ready would make an awfully nice place to put some flowers in the rifle barrels. It reminded me of that morning in San Francisco when I was sitting in my room and watching that flower. I was living in Mexico after the Human Be-In and didn’t expect to come back up to the States. But I did. I managed to get Peggy Hitchcock give me the money to buy the flowers. She sympathized with it and understood it. I dragged them up there. It was just me trying to figure out what to do. We dragged the flowers up through the huge crowd in front of the Pentagon. I was able to hand them out and that was how it happened.

Hitchcock was quite a benefactor for the early psychedelicists. Very much so for Timothy Leary. Did you also hang out at Hitchcock’s Millbrook estate?

Leary was a tricky guy. He was a scientist and at the time, everything was legal. LSD and other synthetic substances were legal all over the world then. I was not up at Millbrook because of that though. I had my studio in New York and I visited some other friends up there. One of them was Peter Fonda, the actor. Leary asked if we would like to try this substance. Both Peter and I said sure. He gave us small shot glasses of whisky and evidently, he had put some LSD in there. Peter and I are sitting there in this beautiful big room, comfortable. It’s around lunch time and I’m hungry. Tim came by and watched us laugh and talk about Beverly Hills and Bel-Air. I mentioned that I was hungry and Leary said he’d be right back. He comes back with a tray with bowls of alphabet soup. By that time, I was not seeing or hearing things as I normally do. There were sounds within sounds within sounds and colours and people were echoing when they were talking. The murals had beautiful hunt scenes because Millbrook was an old mansion and the horses came alive. I was suddenly in 16th century Europe. In addition, we’d just been talking about Beverly Hills. Leary had served us both alphabet soup. You can imagine... The soup was spelling out all kinds of different things... It was quite interesting. To say the least!

You’ve moved around a great deal. Is that necessary for you, inspiration-wise? What kind of inspiration are you finding here in Sweden?

Do I need to move around to be able to work? The answer is yes, I do. As the years go by in this body I find I need to move more and more. I also love children. I’m much older than my wife, almost 38 years older than her. We wanted a baby. She saved my life. I had a heart attack from smoking too many stupid cigarettes. She saved my life a year or so after we first met. They fixed me up in the hospital in San Francisco. I was happy that I wasn’t living in the jungle then. She told me that she wanted to have a baby. I didn’t give it a second thought, I just said OK, sure. We had our baby in San Francisco. My wife comes from Florence and we wanted to go back to Europe. We gave up our place in San Francisco which was very hard for me to do. But off to Florence we went. Florence is one of the most beautiful places in the world. Moving is very important for me, even if it’s within the same city. Moving around the world is my way of life. After you’ve done it for so long, I guess it becomes your way of life.

"People have fear because they did not believe the freaks." Photo © Carl A 2006

Buy FANZINERA (US etc)!
Buy FANZINERA (UK etc)!
Buy FANZINERA (Sweden)!