Art on 12 in the Texas Monthly Magazine
Gordon Fowler
Gordon Fowler
Gordon Fowler is a former high school quarterback and a lapsed rock-and-roll musician. As a Marine combat correspondent in Vietnam Cross of Gallantry. (The character named “Cowboy” in Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam War movie, “Full Metal Jacket,” is based on Fowler.) He built his father’s small business-Wick Fowler’s Two-Alarm chili-into a multi-million-dollar national company. He opened La Zona Rosa, the popular Austin restaurant and nightclub made semi-famous in 1995 by the #1 country hit song ‘Amy’s Back in Austin”. He’s married to the popular rhythm-and-blues musician and recording artist Marcia Ball. And though it all, for more than three decades, Gordon Fowler has been a painter.
Galleries and Museums Exhibited
Santa Fe/ Kennebunkport/throughout Texas
Awards: West Texas Watercolor Society, Kentucky Watercolor Society, Louisiana Watercolor Society, Waterloo Watercolor Group
Commissions:
Dillard’s Department Stores and the Austin Museum of Art Commemorative watercolor to mark the Austin Museum of Art fundraiser/mall opening.
Montgomery Museum of Fine Art “Stonehouse Farm” oil painting for a museum fundraiser John Sharp “Placedo Hall, circa 1958”
Today, Gordon Fowler teaches painting at the Austin Museum of Art and paints in the Southwestern U.S., in Mexico and in Europe.
Artist Comments:
Sometimes I feel I should price my work by the mile because in making it I’ve driven literally thousands of miles crisscrossing Texas, looking for the perfect set-up, passing dozens of good spots along the way.
You don’t have to look hard to find places of great beauty here in Texas, and I get to go looking more than anyone deserves. The resulting paintings are sort of a back roads travelogue on canvas.