ARTISTS
  | | | | B. C. Nowlin Nowlin has no formal education as an artist or writer. He doesn’t type or use a computer. Yet, in his twenty-year career as a fine artist, his works have garnered the attention of celebrity collectors from Tanya Tucker and Robert Plant to Sophia Loren. Nowlin’s artworks have been featured in Jay Leno monologues and are familiar world-wide as album covers and Hollywood set pieces. Nowlin often says, "I became comfortable with mystery." Nowlin was equally comfortable with the rights and rituals of the Pueblo Indians. As a teenager, on a ritual hunt with his Native American friends, it was decided that Nowlin’s symbol would be the bird-and-moon. This calligraphic logo is still signed to every artwork. He would later be discovered by the famous Navajo artist, R.C. Gorman. Though they had little in common, Gorman’s generosity provided Nowlin an open window on a larger art world. Amazed at the spiritual sympathy of B.C.’s images, Allan Houser (the renowned Native American sculptor) and R.C.’s father, Carl Gorman (the Navajo ’Code Talker’) regularly dropped by to challenge and encourage him. Within months, Nowlin was working with Al Momaday, the great Kiowa artist, on their first stone lithographs. In 1982, Gorman and Nowlin exhibited together in the Cates Galerie in Paris in a seminal exhibition introducing Europe to America’s emerging art of the ’New West’. B.C. has remained involved in the promotion of Indian musical and drumming groups nationwide and continues to paint secret ceremonial altars for Native American holy men. For decades, regardless of the season, B.C. has ridden on of his motorcycle to breakfast every morning at a nearby restaurant immortalized by Edward Abby’s "Lonely are the Brave." After conversations, newspapers and coffee, Nowlin returns to his studio and follows the creed inscribed above his easel "New Words, New Images.” To view the works of B. C. Nowlin, click here |