Gary Bowling is a landscape painter whose primary medium is oil paint. His hometown is, in Lamar, Missouri, a small town in southwest Missouri, where he was born in 1948. Linda, his wife, is a retired art teacher and is also an artist. They maintain active studios in Lamar and in Louisville, Kentucky. Bowling initially studied architectural engineering in college. As his interest grew in issues of aesthetics and creative expression, and, generally, the beauty and magic he found in the visual arts he changed majors to art and art education. After earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Arkansas in 1974, he joined the University of Arkansas painting and drawing faculty. He joined the faculty of Westmar College in LeMars, Iowa in 1975 where he was Chairman of the Art Department for eight years. Bowling’s MFA is in painting and drawing. His graduate research explored conceptual art and visual cognition. His primary focus was on mechanisms that invite an art viewer to engage in a personal dialogue with artwork and to encourage expressive and aesthetic insights through deliberately experiencing art on multiple levels. His artistic interests evolved during the years he taught at Westmar, and gradually turned toward paintings that were an exploration of light and atmosphere and ideas associated with an individual’s various relationships to place and the landscape. During a sabbatical in 1981, he was invited to work as a guest artist at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. His experience there helped clarify his interest in landscape painting. In 1983 he quit teaching to focus undivided attention on his painting. He has remained a full-time artist for almost four decades.