The Bowen Arts Tour Team
Let us introduce you to some of our Team Members, each bring a wealth of experience and share a love of the Arts! We hope you have an amazing experience when you join us to Tour Bowens Arts!
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Marie Neys
Marie Neys' websiteMarie has dedicated the last decade to The Arts on Bowen Island. Her background in Marketing, has allowed her to mentored numerous artists, open an art gallery that sells art for over 55 artists, and be a founding committee member for the Bowen Arts Tour. Marie founded the Paint it Forward program and continues to teach others how to create in Acrylics.
You can enjoy her paintings, created in both Acrylics & Oils. Browse her website to purchase Original Art, Home Décor Designs and more. MarieNeys.com -
Janet Esseiva
Janet Esseiva's websiteJanet was born in South Africa and emigrated to Canada with her young family in 1998. Art has always been part of her life, and she attended art school and took workshops and classes at night, while working in IT in South Africa. She moved to Bowen Island in 2005, where she keeps her home studio. She started offering workshops in 2010 which became a sold out hit year after year, with her very accessible teaching style. Her work is represented by several galleries in the Vancouver-Whistler area.
Janet strives to continually reinvent herself as an artist, challenging the limits of both her skill and her preferred medium, acrylics. -
Liz Nankin
Liz Nankin's websiteLiz Nankin has been a costume designer in film, theater and television for over three decades. She has also trained as a puppeteer at the Bob Baker Marionette Theater. Telling stories with fashion and sculpture has led to a passionate life of creating community workshops.
A new Canadian citizen, she moved to Bowen Island in 2018 and joined the Arts Committee of the Hearth Gallery on Bowen Island. She has worked with the Hearth Gallery creating arts community events supporting artists.
As a participating artist in DIVING IN: THE ART OF CLEANING LAKES AND OCEANS, she has a passion for arts activism. She has taught debris art activism workshops in the Metro Vancouver area as well as Bowen Island. She was awarded a community arts grant in partnership with the Bowen Museum and Archives to co-create BOWEN FABLES, a series of five shadow puppet films about Bowen’s history.
It’s a joy to gather our Bowen artists and celebrate their work on Tour Bowen Art. -
Julie Vik
Julie Vik's websiteJulie is excited to be on the inaugural Committee for the 2024 Bowen Arts Tour.
Her background includes a Diploma in Arts and Entertainment Management and years of experience staging events, both festival and living room sized. She has also worked closely with the press as a music publicist, and has miles of road experience touring as the leader of her band Resin at the turn of the millennium in support of the band’s 3 full length CDs. Today, she is mostly retired and enjoys dabbling in any art form within arms reach.
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Jean Bradbury
Jean Bradbury's websiteJean Bradbury paints murals and large-scale images celebrating the diversity of nature and human life. Returning to her home country of Canada after 25 years in Seattle, Jean now explores the forests of Bowen Island for artistic inspiration. As well as her many public art installations she has exhibited her work in the United States, Canada, and Jordan. With degrees in both fine art and graphic design Jean brings years of experience to the Bowen Island Arts Tour.
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Claudia Schaefer
Claudia Shaefer's websiteClaudia Schaefer is a self-taught painter and photographer.
In recent years, her paintings and sculptured pieces with epoxy resin have represented an escape from the mundane and routine. Using bold colour and organic shapes, she explores chaos and order, serenity and excitement. Claudia has gained an intimacy with the natural world through her 30 year career as a botanist and ecologist, and she is fascinated by the way this relationship can manifest in her paintings.
"Northern Lights"
Mixed media and epoxy resin on wood panel
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Nick Jennings
Nick Jennings's websiteNick Jennings is a prolific Bowen Island artist. As well as having worked with oils, gouache and acrylics, he has painted watercolour scenes in Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, New Zealand, Ireland, England, Mexico, and multiple locations around BC. He moved to Canada from the UK in 2005 to be closer to his father, who recently retired from SFU after 50 years in the Philosophy department.
He particularly enjoys exploring the textures and values created by inclement weather, as well as the richness of sunsets reflected in water, making Bowen Island the ideal place to be an artist! Nick has recently adopted the use of oils as his primary medium, but also continues to paint in watercolour, using a technique he developed, which subverts conventional approaches. By profession, he is a lecturer specializing in academic literacy at Capilano University, and he has a Master’s Degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Birmingham. Nick had private lessons at age nine with a celebrated local artist, later studying art, literature, philosophy and education.