Celebrity Centre Nashville | November 5–12

by Bob Doerschuk





Just ten months ago, Jim Warren was hard at work on his portrait of David Bowie, whose music he had admired since first hearing him perform back in 1972. Warren’s son Art was hanging out with his dad that day. At some point, while scrolling through various sites on his phone, something caught the young man’s eye.

“I heard him say, ‘What the heck? Did David Bowie just die?’” Warren recalls, speaking from his studio in Clearwater, Florida. “I said, ‘No, I would have heard about that. Besides, he just came out with a new album.’ And Artie said, ‘Well, a lot of people online are saying that.’ So we turned on the TV and CNN was reporting that he’d just died—right in the middle of our doing this painting.”

A coincidence? Maybe a nudge from the art gods? Whatever it was, the news prompted Warren to set his brushes down for a minute and ponder what this meant to his work in progress.





“The first thing was that this inspired me to finish the painting right away rather than take it slow,” he says. “But I also realized I had to take it more seriously than I had been doing. So Artie and I began to talk about Bowie’s life more than just his music. He did some research for me and discovered that Bowie had done the movie Labyrinth. I thought, how can we fit Labyrinth in? The painting was already pretty full but I did find room, right behind Bowie’s shoulder on the right side of the canvas, where I could paint the Labyrinth maze. So now it’s a tribute not just to David Bowie’s music but to his whole life.”

Ever since high school, when he began teaching himself to paint, Warren has dedicated himself to depicting people he admires. Most of them are icons of pop culture, whose significance he seeks out and reflects through a style that has made him one of the world’s most celebrated fantasy/neo-surrealists. These have included portraits of Prince, one of them a commission from the late artist; John Lennon, the Beach Boys, and Jim Morrison, which Warren painted on an actual door from Morrison’s house.





“I pick people who have had a big influence in whatever field they’re in,” Warren says. “It’s usually personal too but not always. For example, I’m not a Jimmy Buffett fan, but because he has influenced so many things I had to think outside of my own box on that one.”

That process stems from his early work designing covers for rock LPs—those big vinyl things that CDs supplanted back in the Eighties. Hipsters and audiophiles have kept albums from vanishing completely, though arguably their heyday as a medium for visual artists is long gone.