By Cecilia Blotto/ Farout
He is remembered today as a gender-fluid chameleon who crushed genres and cultural norms through his music, but the seed for his creativity was born in an art studio at Bromley School of Art in southeast London.
During his lifetime, Bowie expressed how much art inspired his music. Art-making for him didn’t just take the form of composing songs but also composing on a canvas.
The two mediums worked hand-in-hand throughout his glorious career. Most Bowie fans will know that he painted the self-portrait on the cover of his album Outside.
While living in Berlin, he was so inspired by the German Expressionist movement that it became a central element, not just in his lithographs and portraits—which screamed bold colours and haunting images—but also in his fashion.
Throughout the years, Bowie also built an incredible collection of artwork. His approach was never to just buy a piece for the sake of it; instead, he really immersed himself in it and built a relationship with it.
His exquisite artistic judgement no doubt came from his work as an art critic, writing for Modern Painters magazine and interviewing many contemporary artists in the process.
Buying art meant that Bowie built bonds with the artists who made them, primarily Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who became great friends. Warhol had quite a grasp on Bowie’s musical genius; after having watched his play Pork in London, Bowie was inspired to write a song titled ‘Andy Warhol’ for his fourth album Hunky Dory.
One of Bowie’s most prized possessions was the painting Air Power by Basquiat, which features portraits of Basquiat himself and Bowie.
Bowie never stopped art collecting, even while he secretly battled cancer. His collection became one of the most famous ones when a large part of it was up for sale in 2016 at Sotheby’s. It made more than double the pre-sale estimates, drawing thousands of bidders worldwide and totalling around £33m.
David Bowie’s widow Iman has shared images of a previously unseen painting that the musician created in 2014.
The only previous sighting of the painting in question had been as a partially-obscured backdrop to a series of portraits of Bowie by the photographer Jimmy King at around the same time.
The abstract painting is dazzlingly vibrant splash of yellow and blue and appears to be personally signed by the music legend, who passed away in January 2016.
In 2021, another painting by Bowie that was bought for just £3 fetched over £60,000 at auction. The piece dated back to 1997 and was part of a series of 47 portraits that Bowie worked on around that time.
Take a look at Paul McCartney’s forgotten portrait of David Bowie, 1990
McCartney may not have been a particularly well-received painter but he was certainly enthusiastic.
During his downtime, when not touring or creating his high-flying albums, McCartney enjoyed picking up his brushes and let his imagination run wild or as he himself would put it, “just to let the paint lead the way.”
