Eric Bowman is a painter and illustrator originally from Southern California and now based in the Pacific Northwest.

After years as a successful illustrator, Bowman is apparently focusing on his passion for plein air painting and figure work. His painting site has galleries of recent work, an archive of older work, and figure studies.

He is apparently still active as an illustrator, judging by his portfolio on the Shannon Associates site, in which you can see the influence of some of the great illustrators of the past, like Dean Cornwell, N.C. Wyeth, Haddon Sundblom, and even some of the pulp illustrators.

Bowman’s commercial clients include Time-Life, GTE, Nike, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Kellogs and Hallmark; and his work has been showcased in the Spectrum annuals and has received Gold Medals from the Society of Illustrators.

His gallery paintings are frequently of landscape subjects that include built objects and environments, like houses, towns, boats and roads. Their small size (often 9×12 in; 22×30cm) and the painterly immediacy of their execution leads me to assume that they are largely painted en plein air.

Bowman has a nice flair for the creation of forms with succinct impasto brushstrokes, a refreshing brevity of notation and controlled but vibrant use of color.