Artist Ian Graham Bow is best known for his enduring contribution to Australian sculpture throughout the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. He was born in 1914 in Fitzroy, Victoria, the son of Scottish immigrants, John Roger Bow, an electrical engineer, and his wife, Mary Imrie (née Graham). During the 1930s, he attended Melbourne Technical School. Bow completed his teacher training in 1934 focusing his studies on drawing and design. The following year, he married fellow school teacher Winifred Nellie Dewey. Eventually, Bow and his young family settled in the Prahan suburb of Melbourne.
The early 1940s were an artistically productive period for Bow. In 1940 his work was first represented in the annual member exhibition of the Victorian Artists’ Society, having joined the group in 1939. Originally, Bow’s creative output centred upon painting: landscapes, interiors and still-life compositions.
Bow was a regular exhibitor at Melbourne’s Athenaeum Art Gallery where he held several solo exhibitions. By May 1945 for his solo exhibition at the Athenaeum Gallery he had amassed some 45 oil paintings of wide-ranging subjects. Bow persisted with his goal of establishing himself as a painter in Melbourne’s artistic sphere. He continued to exhibit regularly as a member of the Victorian Artists’ Society (VAS) and in 1946, Bow became inaugural co-editor of the Society’s journal.
Throughout his artistic career, Bow continued to teach. During 1940, he was master at Caulfield Technical College as well as a lecturer at Melbourne Teachers College from 1942-44. Bow took the position of Art Master at Haileybury College, Melbourne in 1945, where he taught until 1971. In 1944, Bow’s passion for sharing knowledge extended to the role of art instructor for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) of Victoria. When the WEA was replaced by the Council of Adult Education (CAE) Bow was appointed to the role of art lecturer, a position he held from 1948 until 1969. The role offered Bow great diversity, including the provision of art instruction to inmates (some serving life sentences) of Pentridge Prison.
In 1949, he remarried and was living with his second wife Andrea (nee Pitt) in Macleod, an outer-Melbourne suburb.
Bow’s career continued to gain momentum, in part fuelled by the selection of his Portrait of John Bayard, n.d., for the 1950 Archibald Prize, and by an overseas study tour he undertook during 1950-51. While overseas Bow attended the 1950 Venice Biennale, toured Italy and France, and spent time in the United Kingdom studying art-school organization and teaching. Bow also visited Henry Moore, the prominent sculptor and public figure, who advocated that sculpture, rather than painting, was the art form with greatest ties to public and social concerns.
Following his return to Australia, Bow became increasingly dissatisfied with what he saw were the conservative tastes of those passing judgment on contemporary Australian art. Bow’s passion for the modernist aesthetic put him at odds with Melbourne’s art establishment. In spite of Bow’s open criticism of the state of art-politics, a retrospective exhibition of his work was displayed at the VAS gallery in 1954. Writing about the exhibition for the Argus, Arnold Shore remarked that “[m]odernism and a desire to find a personal means to expression have impelled [Bow] from impressionism to symbolism, the abstract, and much experiment.”
Bow’s retrospective coincided with the publication of Clive Turnbull’s The Art of Ian Bow, 1954, which captured in print a selection of the artist’s paintings from his fifteen-year career. Turnbull described Bow as a “painter of our time…eager to explore ways of painting.”
In the early 1950s he also produced prints, including lino-cuts that later informed a series of wall sculptures completed by Bow in 1960 and 1961.
In 1956, while making sketches for a painting, Bow’s ideas for a sculptural series first took form. Bow remarked that up to that time he “…just did pieces of construction work and sculpture to assist the form in my painting…As it turned out…I was really a latent sculptor… .”
The 1950s Bow’s self-realization focused his creativity onto crafting in three dimensions rather than two. Bow’s early bronzes, The durable man, c.1955, and Head of Venus, 1958, were acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria. In 1958, Spencer Shier studios produced a documentary entitled: Man into Metal: Sculpture by Ian Bow. That same year Bow resigned his VAS membership, and joined the Contemporary Art Society of Australia, Victoria, until 1961.
In 1961 Bow was invited to participate in the first Mildura Sculpture Triennial event to which he sent four bronzes and a cast aluminium sculpture. Thus Bow’s life-long link with the town at the far north-west of Victoria was established.
Throughout the 1960s Bow continued to exhibit widely, including: the Mildura Sculpture Triennial events of 1964, 1967, and 1970; the ‘Transfield’ exhibition during the mid-1960s; and, the 1966 Art Gallery of New South Wales exhibition ‘Alcorso-Sekers’ Travelling Scholarship Award for Sculpture. He received numerous commissions, among them: a wall sculpture “to create a significant feature in harmony with the new interior design of Michael’s Pharmacy,” Melbourne; the 1966 bronze dedication plaque titled Man, Vision and Perception, for Mildura Arts Centre, and, in 1969 a commission for a tactile work, later titled Urban Cycle, 1975, made in bronze and tin, for the Blind Citizens’ Community Centre in Kooyong, Melbourne.
Bow lost his sight due to complications from a brain tumour. Urban Cycle was his last commission. Ian Bow passed away at Melbourne’s Austin Hospital on 17 November, 1989, aged 75. His work is represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. Galleries in regional Victorian cities that boast Bow’s work include Ballarat, Gippsland/Sale, Hamilton, Mildura and Shepparton, while representation in University collections is at Melbourne University, Australian National University and James Cook University.
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2018
- Last updated:
- 2018
