Richard Irving Bowman (1918–2001) was an abstract painter who worked primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area. He painted in an idiosyncratic style inspired by transcendental visions of nature, exposure to surrealism and investigations into sub-atomic physics. He is considered one of the first fine artists to employ fluorescent paint, which he maintained embodied sub-atomic life energy, beginning in the early 1950s.owman was born in Rockford, Illinois in 1918. He graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago School in 1942, and received a master's degree in Fine Arts from the University of Iowa in 1949. During the 1940s he taught at the Art Institute of Chicago. One of his students was the abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, with whom he exhibited and was romantically linked. In 1950 he was invited to teach in the newly formed art department at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. In 1954 he came to San Francisco at the invitation of Gordon Onslow Ford. From 1949- 1963 he taught intermittently at Stanford University in Stanford, CA. Bowman's reputation and success rose during the period from 1959-1977, when he exhibited continuously at the Rose Rabow Gallery

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