> GOOD TIMES - Santa Cruz County's News & Entertainment Weekly [August 23, 2001]

> The Artists Way

Painter Carol Bowie is brushing together a collection of paintings featuring jazz musicians. As the Art League's Artist of the Year, Bowie will include a painting of her uncle, Charlie Mingus.

> The Key of CAROL

Written and Photographed by Bruce Willey

At one time, Carol Bowie was the proprietor of Lip Smackin' Barbecue, now the Art League's Artist of the Year is painting her destiny.

It wasn't too long ago that Carol Bowie felt like a volcano waiting to erupt. "All this stuff was collecting inside, all this emotional stuff, all the drama was spewing out onto the canvas," Bowie says of her first experience creating art in the late '80s.

She couldn't paint fast enough in those days, sometimes painting two to three canvases in a day. But it wasn't that long before her house filled up with her work and she had to start selling it or giving it away.

Now, 12 years later, she has achieved what most artists often strive their whole lives to attain: a modest, well lit place to do their work, and appreciative, financially supportive audience and unhindered time to make art. Bowie has risen to the top of the local art world and garnered a following of patrons and art lovers that most artists struggle all their lives to woo. And in her short career she has managed to carve out an enviable artistic life, where art is both her source of income and her love.

Talent runs deep and wide in Bowie's family. Her father was a preacher and a poet. Both her stepmother and brother were artists. Her sister is a writer, her husband, a furniture maker. And then there's her uncle, the jazz great Charlie Mingus. Bowie's genes are splattered with a savoir faire that would make any black sheep artist turn green. Yet this largely self-taught artist has had virtually no art education save for a few classes through Santa Cruz County Parks and Recreation and now defunct Santa Cruz Art School.

In a residential area of Watsonville, on a bumpy street badly in need of a paving, is Bowie's modest one-story house, which to this days is still filled to the roof with her artistic vision. Inside, the walls are literally covered with her work; the floors adorned with her husband's intricate, well-crafted furniture. The line between gallery space is a fine one in this house without detraction form the homey, "coffee's on the stove," feel. Vern, Bowie's husband of 33 years, sits at one of his solid handmade tables sipping tea and reading the paper. Their 24-year-old son, who has cerebral palsy, is away for the morning at the Skills Center.

Walking through the house to her studio in the backyard, Bowie radiates warmth and a maternal presence that would bring the worst prodigal son home to stay. Her loose-fitting cotton pants and shirt ensemble match her easy-going demeanor and laid-back poise.  Vern hoots down the hall that he is going to Orchard Supply Hardware - "His home away from home, " Bowie says with a laugh. And then she says that she and her husband are both living their passions after years of searching for careers that combines their artistic talents with the resources to live.

"There is literally no resistance," she explains. "We're doing what we love to do, so it means that it's not really work. It's playing all the time."

Playing indeed. Bowie's outdoor studio is a virtual playground of art supplies and images. Brushes, thick tubes of acrylic and oil paint, crayons, a large wooden easel and worktable litter the neat but cluttered studio. Her latest work, a series of 45 portraits of jazz greats on oil and canvas stare out from behind each other, from the shelves, and some simply rest on the floor. Quincy Jones, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Jelly Roll Morton, Charlie Parker, and of course Charles Mingus, all done in a new-realistic splash of spirited color that transforms the familiar black and white images of the jazz starts into life. Bowie says she is constantly changing from print-making to painting to pen and ink and often combines the mediums to suite her whims.

"To me creativity is like this evolving thing," she says. I don't , in fact I can't do the same thing twice. When I copy my own stuff it's a dead thing. Music, art, creativity has its own energy; it has a life. Because of that , people experiencing it get a shot of it. Whatever you (the artist) injected into the art, they get it."

Like her famous uncle, Bowie takes an almost improvisational approach to her art. With little or no planning she likes to infuse her emotions into a painting or print, connecting along the way to what she refers to as an indescribable energy that envelops her while she is "playing." When she leafs through a book of photographs of her paintings, many of which have been sold, she says, "To me, in that (creative) state, my world is perfect. Nothing needs to be added or subtracted. I think it's just the energy we use for everything, sexual, creative. I think it's all the same energy. But it's just the way we use it. The more we can she our stuff - our negative energy - the clearer that line to the source is."

Bowie feels she has spent a lot of time ridding herself of the negative things, both in life and the way she perceived her first attempts at creating art.

> From Watts to Wattsonville

Born in the Watts area of Los Angeles, Bowie's parents left her in the care of her school teacher grandmother and Pentecostal minister grandfather.

"I had a very warped upbringing," Bowie says of her past. "Most of the people in my family are very expressive and emotional and that energy was used in both positive and negative ways."

She remembers going to small smoky clubs in Los Angeles to watch her uncle perform.

"His music is rebellious," she says. "He was a real activist in the way he used his music; all that anger and angst came out of the life he had."

Bowie recalls hearing stories that many jazz musicians couldn't eat in the places they played and often drove around all night looking for a place to sleep, often sleeping in their cares because most hotels wouldn't let them stays as they were African Americans.

"It was like, 'I want your music but I don't want you,'" she says. "It's hard for me to digest sometimes. Living in an area like this that is predominantly white, I don't see myself as black first. I'm Carol. I can open any door and walk through it. This is not to say that I am unaware of what's going on elsewhere. In this community being black works to my advantage. People want to know who I am."

After graduating from Manual Arts High School, Bowie worked as a telephone operator before becoming a deputy sheriff. For eight years she worked with women in jail, becoming what she calls a "crack-shot with guns." But the difficult work started to affect her and she found a job working as a security guard for Hughes Aircraft.

After two failed marriages ("We were taught that if a partner didn't work out, find another.") she met her current husband and had their son Aaron.

After visiting her father and stepmother , who had retired in the Santa Cruz area, the couple decided to move here.

"It was the best thing we could have done to move up here because that's when the real positive things started happening to us," Bowie says. "We got a chance to blossom. When we first moved here our black friends said, 'Why do you want to move to Santa Cruz? There's no black people up there.' But that's not why we moved here. We moved here because we love the area. I didn't feel at home until I got here."

Soon after settling down, Bowie's husband opened an electronics shop near Zs' Liquors on Mission Street. Bowie noticed that a restaurant, where the present day Vasili's Greek Food & Barbque now stands, was for sale. Even without any restaurant experience Bowie didn't hesitate to jump at the chance. Within 30 days, with the help of Vern's vast carpentry skills, she opened Lip Smackin' Barbecue. By 1983 she had franchised into Capitola and Watsonville. Though the barbecue business was a big hit, knocking out all the competition, the restaurant world proved too stressful.

"Like a baby that grows up, pretty soon it gets to be the age where it starts telling you what to do," Bowie says.

The Santa Cruz Art School had just opened up on River Street and Bowie and her stepmother began taking a few classes. Suddenly, painting was all that Bowie wanted to do despite the fact that she had little intention or confidence to even sign her work, much less sell it. But she was getting pats on the back and Bowie says that it takes any artist a long time until they can find their stride and call themselves artists.

"It takes a while to realize that your work is worth something," she says. "Some of us don't start our feeling valued as people. We have to find it in ourselves. It takes a lot of conscious work."

In 1988 Bowie had her first show at the Louden Nelson Community Center. The response was overwhelming. With 55 pieces on the walls, she walked away with $15,000 from selling her paintings.

"I said to myself, 'you can do this,' " she says with a little laugh. Since that fateful day Bowie has been living the good artist life.

And her optimism and self-confidence is infectious. At time her articulation of the art process is peppered with a can-do chestnut that seems to suggest her destiny also includes a self-help book for struggling and beaten artists. In fact she does take on the occasional artist in need of some ego boosting, or one that wants to be inspired. With a quick sideways tangent about favorite television shows (hers is HBO's "Six Feet Under," which she finds refreshing), Bowie believes we all have wonderful gifts.

"Our minds are [a] lot more powerful than we realize and we always think we are operating at the mercy of something when it doesn't have to be that way," she says. "As far as we know we only come this way once. So why not get the most out of it."