Geoffrey Bowman Art

Geoffrey Bowman was born in San Francisco on December 29, 1928. In 1946, he quit high school and joined the Navy and traveled to China, Korea, the Philippines and Hawaii. In 1948 after being discharged from the Navy, Bowman earned his high school equivalency diploma. Five years later he met and married his first wife Mill, and graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in Social Science. During this time, he also became intensely interested in art and printmaking and began to study art formally. By 1957, Geoffrey had earned his graduate degree in art and began to teach art in San Quentin.

In 1960, Bowman left his teaching job at San Quentin to spend more time working on his art and examining Asian philosophy at the American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco. During this time to support himself and his wife, Bowman drove a taxi at night so that he could have his days free to work in the studio. In 1964, he joined the art faculty at San Jose State University and moved to San Jose and became a full professor in 1973. Bowman taught at SJSU for 29 years, specializing in lithography and intaglio printmaking techniques. At the same time, he was deeply involved in his work and accumulated an impressive professional exhibition record, and his work was exhibited regionally, nationally and internationally.

Bowman's work is in several public permanent collections, including the San Jose Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Achenbach Foundation of Graphic Arts San Francisco, Lannan Foundation New York and Crown Press Berkeley. After retiring from teaching in 1994, Bowman turned to paint as his primary medium of expression. Although there was a media shift, he continued to focus on one subject, the consistency of change. Bowman became quite private in his later years and had his last one-man public exhibition in 2001 at the Fredrick Spratt Gallery, San Jose. Bowman died in San Jose, California, on October 9, 2009.