Gwil Owen is a polymath: an Academy Award nominated songwriter; the curator par excellence at Howlin' Books; and — evidently — a visual artist whose imaginative collages are now on display in the lobby of The Belcourt Theatre.
Owen counts song cuts among luminaries like Keith Richards, Levon Helm and Little Feat, but has recently found the time to also make mysterious images from the detritus he sifts through during his loving leafings as a book dealer.
The artist recently gave a great interview to fellow songsmith Jeff Finlin in The East Nashvillian. Here's a quote:
The collage work came back to him after a longtime friend asked if he would create a collage for the cover of an album he was working on. Owens had played with collage back in his younger days and agreed. What he found was a creative avenue that had been missing in his life. He began ripping up old books, manuals, and scraps of paper he had lying around and pasting images together real time (no computers).
“What came out,” Owen says, “came out fully formed. It’s something I had inside of me that I had no idea was there.”
Film itself is a collage art, and I can't think of a better place to see Owen's work than at Nasvhville'amazing art house cinema. Check out the teaser images below, and be sure to visit The Belcourt Theatre before Hiraeth: Homesick for a Place that Never Was closes on Monday, June 30.
