About the artist...

View Gordon's 2022 Artist Talk and Tour.

Take a virtual tour of Fowler's 2017 show at Wally Workman Gallery here.

Take a virtual tour of Fowler's 2015 show at Wally Workman Gallery here.

"Painting the Texas landscape for more than 50 years has instilled a sense of duty in me to record the beauty of our incredible state. We are losing a great deal of our scenic state to development. It’s harder to find undisturbed vistas to paint every year. Thanks to some patron ranchers, I’m able to get off the highway and paint mostly unchanged scenes. I painted a whole show on the Annandale Ranch, with 6 miles of Frio River running through it. Many smaller spreads have given me access through the years. I try to be honest about my subjects and paint them as I see and feel about them. I’m proud to be one of Texas Parks and Wildlife”s Centennial artists. I was assigned Bastrop State Park and Honey Creek Park to paint for the 100th anniversary show in 2023. I had a chance to change the Bastrop assignment due to the fire damage but chose to paint it. It deserves a place in the show. My piece is titled Coming Back.

Texas is hardscrabble in many areas, rough and scraggly, challenging to paint, but that makes for good, abstract design. Like in Guy Clark’s song, Desperados, I’m pushing eighty, but I plan to paint and teach until the cows come home."

Fowler is a native Texan, a man of many talents and numerous accomplishments, who has led a colorful and impassioned life. He is a former high school quarterback and a lapsed rock and roll musician. As a marine combat correspondent in Vietnam in 1967-68, he won two Purple Hearts and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. (The character named Cowboy in Stanley Kubrick's movie "Full Metal Jacket" is based on Fowler.) He built his father's small business, Wick Fowler's Two-Alarm Chili, into a prominent national company. He opened La Zona Rosa, a popular Austin restaurant and night-club made semi-famous in 1995 by the hit country song "Amy's Back In Austin." Fowler is a devoted plein air painter, creating fresh, natural canvasses entirely on location. He has taught watercolor at The University of Texas as well as at The Contemporary Austin. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums from Santa Fe to Kennebunkport and throughout Texas, and he has received awards for both his watercolors and his oils.