Ron Bowen is an American artist currently living in Paris. A career of more than forty years has been marked by the wide range of his interests and work. He has shown paintings, drawings, mixed media and photographic works at galleries in most major art capitals, participated in International Exhibitions, illustrated numerous books. But he has also produced sets, costumes and lighting for dance and theatre companies in the US, UK, and Continental Europe as well as having worked with the Palaeontologist Richard Leakey in the reconstruction of early Hominids in East Africa. His works are in numerous collections including those of J.P. Morgan, the World Bank, and the Smithsonian Institute in Washington

Over this time he has taught artists of all ages and backgrounds at leading art schools in both the US and Europe. These include The Parsons School and Pratt Institute in New York, and, in London, the Chelsea College of Art, Goldsmiths College and, for many years, the Slade School of Fine Art, where he was head of Undergraduate Painting until 1997. More recently he was Head of Studios at Studio Art Centres International, in Florence, Italy. He currently organises and leads workshops and seminars at various institutions, mainly around the subject of drawing.

To explain the diversity of his art activities he cites his model of the artist as a ‘visual activist’ and his mistrust of any narrow definitions of art practice. He strongly believes that the methods of enquiry of the arts and the sciences have much to learn from each other and that drawing, particularly, is the area in which they meet - that it is one of humankind’s essential perceptual and investigative tools and that in order to draw anything we must inevitably question how we see it. He has elaborated on this perceptual approach to drawing in the book Drawing Masterclass and numerous articles, and is currently preparing a text and accompanying set of interactive ‘visual games’ for “Investigating Drawing”, to be published online by the National Portrait Gallery, London.

He is Reader Emeritus of the Slade School of Fine Art and Patron of the Byam Shaw School of Art.