OWEN
Owen’s art reflects his intensely spiritual nature. He had visions of a world beyond the physical, which he was only able to articulate through his imagery. He was also a passionate environmentalist, who joined the Green Party shortly before his death, and was committed to preserving a natural habitat for all living things undamaged by human interference.
It was to respect Owen’s commitment to environmental causes, that Katherine made a decision, after discussion with Owen’s four children (two from Owen’s first marriage to Gill and two from her marriage), that the best way to honour his art legacy was to ensure that any profits from the sale of Owen’s work would go to environmental charities. The project Katherine has chosen is Treesistance, a project operated by Sinchi, a charity registered in the Netherlands with the ANBI charitable status quality mark.
About the artist
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Treesistance is a project which supports indigenous people to protect the Brazilian rainforest, providing (for instance) cameras which can identify the GPS co-ordinates of illegal logging activity, thereby enabling the Federal Authorities in Brazil to close down the illegal logging sites. The charity’s founders take no money for the work which they do.
Thank you for visiting this website. We hope that Owen’s work has spoken to you and enriched your day in some positive way.
More about Owen
Growing up in a small mining village in Wales, Owen went to study Art and Art History at what is now part of the University of Bristol, where he was selected as one of the Young Contemporaries, an award given to art students considered nationally to be the most promising artists in their year. Owen also won a post-graduate place to study at the Royal Academy but on learning that his childhood sweetheart was expecting their child, Owen gave up his art career to become a teacher and support his new family.
Whether to underline his commitment to his new path in life or as a sign of huge psychic pain, Owen burned his artwork in a bonfire in the family garden when is two eldest children were still very young. He would not paint or draw again for almost twenty years.
When Owen tried to paint again in middle age, he found himself unable to overcome a host of increasingly intense allergic-like reactions to the oil paint media and cleaning products he needed to engage with. In desperation in 1992, Owen bought an early Apple Mac computer, and started producing artwork using digital technology heavily supported by hand drawn images, produced either on paper or on a digital screen.
From the purchase of that Apple Mac in 1992 until his death in February 2016, Owen created many startlingly beautiful digital images using computer technology far inferior to what is available today.
A profound fear of rejection meant that other than submitting one or two pieces to an annual competition run by the New York Museum of Computer Art and putting some thumbnail sketches on the artists’ website SITO, Owen’s art was never seen publicly, although he always maintained that he did want to have an exhibition and to sell the work online at some point.
In 2015, Owen’s second wife Katherine tried to help him to identify the pieces, which he wanted to take forward to exhibition. He printed out paper copies of multiple digital images, and made Katherine promise that whatever happened to him, she would make sure that there would be a public exhibition of his work.
Katherine made the promise but had no idea that over the previous twenty years, out of fear of losing images and general mental chaos, Owen had made multiple copies of every folder of work, each time he made even a tiny change to one image in that folder, and after his death she was confronted with 10 huge hard drives, each containing very similar but not identical images, and subsets of some images but not of others.
Katherine eventually enlisted the help of a family friend Torie, who had known her and Owen for a number of years, and they continued the painstaking process of sifting through all the folders to find images which matched to the 150 or so images, which Owen had identified as the ones he had wanted to be made public.
By August 2019, Katherine and Torie were finally in a place where they thought they would be able to proceed. An exhibition at the Barbican had been provisionally planned for Spring 2020 but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world and threw all those plans into disarray.
It has taken until Autumn 2023 to be in a position to re-launch the website and begin to think again about that exhibition. Once the Exhibition dates are finalised, they will be made available on the website. Until then, we hope you will find images, which speak to you and which you would like to make part of the story of your life.