Ronald Bowen was born in 1944.  He grew up in Lake Placid Florida, a quiet town surrounded by lakes, citrus groves, and ranches.  From an early age he showed a talent for drawing.

 

From 1962 to 1967 he studied art, along with music and languages, at Florida State University in Tallahassee, completing his final year at their study center in Florence, Italy.  This first contact with Europe was a turning point for him.  His painting style at the time is mostly figurative.

 

Finished with his university studies, he taught art for a year at his former school in Lake Placid.  In 1968 he chose to return to Europe to teach and continue his art studies, spending a summer in Paris, then a year teaching in a small international boarding school in England, followed by a year in Nice, France, enrolled as a full-time painting student at the Ecole Nationale d'Art Décoratif.  To support himself in Nice, he worked evenings in a hotel.  By this time Bowen is totally into abstract painting and relating it to music.  

 

In 1970 he returned to Paris as "Artist in Residence" at the Fondation des Etats-Unis, a scholarship offered by the Harriet Hale Woolley Foundation for artists and musicians.  In 1971 he was accepted  by the Service de la Recherche of the ORTF (the official French radio and Television research center) to realize a short abstract animated film using their equipment.  Spending that summer in Florida, he began to compose his own music in various classical styles, returning to Paris in the fall of of 1971.  To support himself he worked first as a dishwasher, then in a hotel again.  The film project, entitled "Peinture et Fugue en Sol Majeur", was finally realized in the summer of 1972.  For the music he composed a baroque style fugue for organ.  The Woolley scholarship was renewed in 1972.  

 

During the year following the film, he realized that with his abstract work he was seeking some sort of cosmic mystery that was really more present in every day images around him, because Life itself is the greatest mystery of all.  He then gradually began a return to figurative drawing and painting in a very realistic manner, which encompasses his main body of work from then on.  

 

In the fall of 1973 he began teaching art classes part-time at the American School of Paris and has since made that city his home, retiring from the school in 2008.  In 1993 Ronald Bowen received French Nationality, making him a citizen of both the U.S. and France.  In 2010 he was awarded the Monique Corpet Prize for painting from the Taylor Foundation in Paris.  in 2018 the Taylor Foundation awarded him the Madeleine Couderc Painting Prize.

 

The artist lives and works in a light-filled Montmartre studio surrounded with plants overlooking Paris rooftops and the Basilica of Sacré Coeur in the distance.