Shrine Stories: Night Flyers

Renowned for his bright, whimsical style, artist Dean Bowen is best known for works that bring joy to audiences. But in this episode, we explore a surprising shift. Inside the Shrine’s Galleries hangs Night Flyers, a powerful departure from Bowen’s usual tone. Join us as Dean shares the story behind this work and why he felt compelled to create it.

Transcript

LAURA THOMAS: The Shrine of Remembrance acknowledge the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which the Shrine stands, and pay our respects to their elders, past and present. As a place of remembrance and storytelling, we honour their deep connection to country and waterways shaped by generations of stories and memories.

LAURA THOMAS: Welcome to the Shrine Stories podcast, a place where we take a look at the stories behind the objects on our gallery floor. My name is Laura Thomas. Here at the Shrine, we have many artworks on display, and today we're going to delve into the story of one that's hung in our modern conflicts gallery. The artwork is called Night Flyers, and it's by Dean Bowen, who's an artist working across several different mediums, including painting, sculpture and print making. Dean joins me now to share the story behind this artwork. Good morning, Dean. Thank you for coming in.

DEAN BOWEN: Good morning, Laura. How are you?

LAURA THOMAS: I'm well. I'm well. Now tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you become an artist?

DEAN BOWEN: Well, I was very interested in art as a child, and enjoyed the art classes at school, having no idea what it meant to be an artist, but one of my early teachers said to me that you could go to an art school, where they did art every day. And I decided, probably at around the age of 14, that that's what I wanted to do. So I went to RMIT in Melbourne, initially studying printmaking. And after finishing art school, I worked in various jobs for around 12 years, and did painting and artwork at night and weekends thinking about how to make the transition from a part time artist to a full time artist. In 1989 I made the leap of faith to leave paid employment to work full time in the studio, so I've been working freelance as an artist for the last 35 years.

LAURA THOMAS: So that leap of faith definitely paid off.

DEAN BOWEN: It did. It was my passion. It was something I felt I just had to do. And of course, in the first few years, it was extremely difficult to get established, and there's been difficult times, obviously, since then, but I'm still very passionate about it, and I love painting, sculpture, printmaking, all the techniques actually are very, very interesting and good to work with. So I suppose I've concentrated more on painting and sculpture over the last, say, 25 years, but still very passionate about it, and still going to the studio every day.

LAURA THOMAS: It's wonderful. And the specific artwork that we're discussing today is called Night Flyers. For those who might not have been in the Shrine to see it, can you describe the artwork for our audience?

DEAN BOWEN: Well, Night Flyers is a print I made in 1993 so it's actually 30 years old now, it's quite scary to think it's that old. It was made with an unusual technique, or etching technique, called spit bite, where acid is painted directly onto the metal plate to etch in the design of the artist's work. It's not a technique I'd use particularly often, but that's how the Night Flyers was done. It's a vertical picture of four planes flying at night with their wheels exposed and the portholes of the plane shining brightly through the night sky.

DEAN BOWEN: At that time, I made prints by starting out by actually scraping the metal away completely on the plate to begin with, like a textured surface, and texture is something that's continued in my work through painting, print making and sculpture. It's a common element in all the techniques I work with. From those scrape marks, I painted the plane images with acid directly onto the plate and made the black shapes of the planes. It's a very fluid way of working, and it's not particularly common way that I work, so it's a very unusual print from that period. Because of the wars in the Middle East at the time and Australia's involvement, I started to drift towards making some pictures about war, and particularly Australia's involvement in the Middle East. The wars that Australia has been involved in, and I suppose just different conflicts, is something that I am quite interested in, but particularly Australians at war. For some reason, even as a child, I was interested, and have been interested in that ever since, and coming from the country, growing up in central Victoria, in the town of Maryborough, and just travelling around seeing the various monuments to Australian soldiers of the First and Second World War, it's always sort of touched me, the tragedy of what happened and how Australia got sort of drawn into other people's conflicts. It's something that, you know, I'm not particularly comfortable with, and when I've seen those memorials, it does touch me and does make me feel sad at times. So when Australia became involved again in the Middle East wars of the early 90s, it did lead me to make these etchings about that issue.

LAURA THOMAS: Because this was around the time of the first Gulf War. Were you seeing lots of videos and images coming out of that that maybe led you to do these pieces?

DEAN BOWEN: I think that war was particularly covered a lot, yes, on television. And I think everyone was very affected by those images, like I was. So it did drift into my artwork. And war is not a subject that I particularly have done a lot of imagery with so it was quite unusual for me to do pictures like that. Usually, my work is about, I suppose, in a lot of ways, optimism and the joys in life, the joys of children and mark making and adventures in, you know, interpreting landscape, the human figure, etc. That's sort of what I tend to do more than these war images that I did at that time.

LAURA THOMAS: Why was it so important for you then to have that departure and to show these images in a very kind of monotonal way?

DEAN BOWEN: I was specialising a lot in printmaking at that time, so I did do a lot of black and white work. Around that time, I actually had been working in France quite a bit with some printers, and I flew to France between 1990 and 1993 three times, made three visits. And I'm not normally flying. So the plane was, the journey in the plane was also creeping into my mind and seeing the images on the TV of military planes fighting at night drifted into my work, and that's how the Night Flyers came about. I see the work more as a war work than a domestic commercial flight, but that did influence my imagery also at the time. When I was working in France, in the south of France in 1990, I was in a very small village, very isolated from the events of the world. I had no television. The radio was all in French, and my French was minimal, to say the least, and it was sort of idyllic. But every now and again, a military jet would fly over at high speed and quite low to the ground. And I was receiving letters from Australia of, oh, are you worried about, you know, the issues of war. And I was sort of completely unaware of what was happening while I was living there. But of course, coming back, everything was revealed, and I started making these kinds of works.

LAURA THOMAS: And this work, Night Flyers, is part of a wider collection of etchings from around that time. What are some of the other things that you depicted?

DEAN BOWEN: I probably made around a dozen or so prints with a war theme at that period. Others were of imaginary military vehicles, like a couple of different versions of tanks, and also sort of symbolic works of planes heading towards the ground, almost crashing. They were all particularly black or black and white. And also some of the imagery that started to creep in was of boats, which was another new thing that happened.

LAURA THOMAS: Now you mentioned that your works are usually light and bright and colourful. But there is another work, series of work that you've done that's based on war and conflict, and that's Centaur and for those who have been to the Shrine, they might remember that that was an exhibition that we had here, gosh, back in 2020, the time flies a little bit. But I was hoping you could tell me a little bit about that body of work as well.

DEAN BOWEN: Well, the boat etching that I did in the early 90s was probably a precursor to the Centaur series, but I didn't realise that at the time,

LAURA THOMAS: And just jumping in here, for those who don't know the stories, Centaur was a hospital ship that was struck by a Japanese submarine torpedo in May 1943 so those on board included medical staff of 52 men, including eight doctors, 12 army nurses, and a civilian crew of 75 merchant seamen, as well as 193 members of the 2/12 field ambulance and of these 332 people, only 64 survived. The wreck of Centaur was actually found off the coast of South Queensland in 2009.

DEAN BOWEN: I was very moved by the discovery of the ship. And I had been thinking about hospital ships, and I'd made a trip to Gallipoli to visit the site there of the landings, so it was sort of hovering around in the back of my mind, but I found the discovery of the wreck of the centre as a very moving and emotional thing, and I just started to do charcoal drawings of hospital ships. They weren't really for any exhibition or planned exhibition. I just sort of made them for my own interest, and ended up with quite a large selection of drawings. The ships weren't actually the Centaur, but they were inspired by the Centaur. A few drawings were of the Centaur, and others were just general hospital ships. So the series developed from the finding of the wreck of the Centaur.

LAURA THOMAS: And what did it mean to have those works together here at the Shrine?

DEAN BOWEN: Well, when Neil Sharkey, the curator at the Shrine, approached me to do the exhibition, I was absolutely thrilled. To have work exhibited at the Shrine was just, you know, for me, extremely moving, and it was a great pleasure to work on that series of works and develop an exhibition with special lighting. And I did additional drawings for the exhibition with Neil, we decided to do an animation based on the drawings, and we ended up working with the Japanese animator, which was particularly moving, thinking that the atrocity of the sinking of the Centaur with a large loss of Australian lives, of doctors, dentists, nurses and, you know, non combatants. It was lovely to think that after 80 years, that we'd sort of come full circle, where an Australian artist could work with a Japanese artist about a very sensitive subject still to the families, of course, of victims and survivors of the Centaur. So it was an event that happened a long time ago, but it's something that's still alive today. And the memory of those people who sacrificed their lives trying to help others in terrible conflict is, you know, really powerful subject.

LAURA THOMAS: And for those of you who are interested in viewing the virtual tour of the exhibition or the animation that Dean mentioned, it is on our website at shrine.org.au You can find all of the past exhibitions there, and it's wonderful to be able to virtually walk through it and see all those pieces together. Now, Dean, yours is one of many artworks that we have on display here at the Shrine, the Night Flyers, and I've always thought that there's a lot of complexity around using art, which is typically a beautiful aesthetic medium to depict something that is quite the opposite- war, the atrocities that occur. So why did you use art to convey this kind of message?

DEAN BOWEN: I think art is, for me, an opportunity to express myself and my feelings, some of those feelings, like any person,are very happy and pleasurable things. But then other things in life, of course, are not like that. So it was just another sort of chapter in my art making. I guess I'm addicted to the studio, I go every day, and it's, as I mentioned earlier, it's my passion. So the opportunity to express yourself and your ideas in art. It's, it's a way of living that, you know, I'm extremely attracted to, and it gives me the opportunity here to express my feelings and record my memories of the world, others and myself.

LAURA THOMAS: And I've always thought as well. it's one of those mediums that, you know, we have visitors from around the world here, they don't necessarily speak English, they might not read the labels or understand that kind of complex part of it, but seeing an artwork like the Night Flyers, I think it transcends that, and people can connect with it.

DEAN BOWEN: I think art is open to interpretation by the viewer, and different people will see different things. One of my favourite artists is the French artist, Jean Dubuffet, and one of his comments was, everyone agrees that there's good art and bad art, but no one can agree which belongs to which category. So yeah, I don't, I have, I have my feelings about the art, and to me, it's a mystery too. I mean, one of the biggest thrills in art making is when you make something that surprises you or that you think you couldn't make, and you learn things about yourself, because when it works at its best way, it's a creative thing, and it's not planned out too much. It's spontaneous, hopefully. And you know, there's lots of discoveries to be made. So when other people view my art, they can take their own interpretation into it, and I'm quite open to how people feel about it. I'm still thinking myself. You know, not everything works. It's the very nature of creative work that some things are successful and others are not. It's part of the journey.

LAURA THOMAS: Well, thank you so much, Dean for sharing the story behind Night Flyers. It's been absolutely wonderful to talk to you and about your process.

DEAN BOWEN: Thank you, Laura, thanks very much.

LAURA THOMAS: Thanks for listening to this episode of the podcast. For more, make sure you hit subscribe, wherever you listen.