STEVEN Bowerman decided to be an artist at age seven.
With a few decades behind him, and a solo exhibition record longer than a sheet of A4, the West Ender is about to test his skills against hundreds of others in Australia by entering the Archibald Prize.

Bowerman’s painting The Boschman of Earthly Delights features indigenous actor/ artist. didgeridoo player Rodney Boschman.
The pair met at Woodford Folk Festival in 2004 and Bowerman discovered Rodney’s fascinating life story – he was removed from the Watjarri Tribe in Western Australia under government policy. His new Dutch parents took Rodney, and four other indigenous children, back to Holland, where they led a life of quality education but never forgot their roots.

Bowerman used the Australian indigenous-Dutch connection as the basis for his large-scale painting, ‘Boschman meets Bosch’.

Using a Dutch master Hieronymus Bosch painting in the background, the portrait features a life-sized Rodney standing on a black and white tiled floor, symbolising a chess board and hinting at the government policy from 1909 to 1969 which treated indigenous children as pawns. Rodney wears a singlet bearing the Aboriginal flag, with the red and black swapped around. It is one of his own paintings which Bowerman purchased from him early in their friendship…

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