About Robin

Hello and welcome to Art for your Nest! My name is Robin Rowley Bowman, and I am a regional and national award-winning fabric collage artist.

After over 15 years of creating original sea-themed and nature-related art made by stitching together hand-dyed cloth, threads, buttons, and beads, I am pleased to be able to offer you the opportunity to purchase my new line of beautiful handcrafted products with images of my original art online. This way, you can browse at your convenience, easily make selections, and have products delivered to your door - or to the door of a friend or client.

My artistic gift first showed up in childhood, when my preferred toys were crayons, paints, and fabrics. Thanks to my parents, I had many opportunities to explore various art mediums at an early age. From needle arts to watercolor, and later to mixed media and woodworking in college, the fun was always in the creating. This is still true today, as I continue to explore ways to expand upon my art and create new offerings from my original fiber art collages. And, I suppose not unlike other artists, I love to experiment with new ways of creating, using new materials and tools. Like a lighthouse, art has always “called me home” and provides balance to my life..

After a fair amount of years as a nurse, fabric collage discovered me. I began to seriously consider my life as an artist. What would that look like? I did a lot of reflecting on what kind of art I really found joy in creating and read a lot of books. Clearly, whatever I did would have to involve lots of color, and would probably have to include stitching of some sort. Browsing at a local book store one day, a book cover stood out among the rest in the Art Section. Molas! What in the world is that? Traditionally created by the Kuna Indians in the Panama region, creating molas involves layering fabric, cutting through the layers revealing other colors, and then stitching the cloth as an image was revealed. I was fascinated and decided to pursue this further. This provided a foundation which evolved into my current collage process.

In an effort to develop my own unique style, I started experimenting with fabric collage and developed a plan around my favorite subjects, mostly fish, which remind me of childhood summers spent on a lake. To begin, I choose a particular fish or other wildlife as inspiration for creating an original collage using a variety of hand-dyed fabrics, threads, beads and buttons. Then I deconstruct the fish to identify distinct areas to place specific fabrics. Finally, I stitch the selected fabrics together and add embellishments. As I create each original collage, I often work intuitively, which is part of the fun. Vibrant, saturated colors are a must, and a touch of black and white completes the design. The result is an anatomically correct subject with my own spin on colors. My goal is to elicit a response in my audience to look closer at the parts that have become the whole, as well as the whole that is made up of small parts. This original fabric collage art (to date nearly 40 originals) is also the source of the imagery offered in my new line of handcrafted products for the home, including pillows, large and small gift/jewelry boxes and framed three-tile fish.

What’s next you might ask? Jewelry. Let’s just say I wandered off to my local art center one day during Covid to find creative inspiration. And there I discovered a whole new world in forming and creating sterling silver jewelry. It was a wonderful discovery, which led to 3 years of practice, practice, practice; however I still wasn’t satisfied with the lack of color in the work. Luckily, I bumped into the art of enameling on fine silver, and the rest is unfolding as you read this. As the quote says on the homepage of this site, “A good artist has less time than ideas.” (Martin Keppenberger). I don’t know if I am a great artist, but I sure could use some more time!