David Bowie the Painter: His Visual Art and DHead Series

Art School Roots

David Bowie's identity as a visual artist preceded his musical career. At Bromley Technical High School, he studied art under Owen Frampton (father of guitarist Peter Frampton) and demonstrated sufficient talent to consider pursuing fine art professionally. The decision to focus on music rather than visual art was not a rejection of painting but a pragmatic choice about which medium offered greater immediate opportunity.

Throughout his musical career, Bowie maintained a private painting practice that few outside his immediate circle knew about. He sketched constantly, filling notebooks with drawings during tours and recording sessions. His half-brother Terry Burns, who had introduced him to Beat literature and jazz, also exposed the young David to contemporary art, fostering an engagement with visual culture that would prove as enduring as his relationship with music.

Influences: Bacon, Auerbach, and Expressionism

Bowie's painting was most profoundly influenced by Francis Bacon, the Irish-born British painter whose distorted, psychologically intense figurative work had a visceral impact on him. Bacon's screaming popes, contorted bodies, and raw emotional intensity resonated with the same sensibility that drove Bowie's most unsettling musical work. The fragmentary, anxious quality of Bacon's portraits finds clear echoes in Bowie's own figurative paintings.

Frank Auerbach, the German-born British painter known for thick impasto surfaces and obsessive reworking of portraits, was another significant influence. Bowie admired Auerbach's commitment to the process of painting itself — the idea that a portrait could be worked and reworked until it achieved an emotional truth that transcended photographic accuracy.

During the Berlin years, Bowie became deeply engaged with German Expressionism, spending time at the Brücke Museum and studying the work of Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and other members of Die Brücke group. The angular, emotionally charged visual language of Expressionism informed both his paintings and the visual aesthetic of albums like “Heroes”.

The DHead Portrait Series

Bowie's most substantial body of visual work is the DHead series, a collection of approximately 47 portraits produced throughout the 1990s. The series depicted friends, collaborators, and anonymous subjects in a style that combined figurative representation with expressionistic distortion. Each painting was numbered sequentially (DHead I, DHead II, and so forth) and executed in a variety of media including oil paint, acrylics, and mixed media.

The DHead portraits share a consistent aesthetic: faces that are recognizably human but deliberately distorted, with features displaced, colors heightened, and surfaces worked to a textured finish. The influence of Bacon is particularly evident in the way the subjects' faces seem to slide and fracture, as if caught between states of being. Several of the portraits depict Iggy Pop, whose angular features and intense presence made him a natural subject for Bowie's expressionistic style.

One DHead painting gained unexpected public attention in 2021 when a work purchased at a Canadian thrift store for five dollars was authenticated as DHead XLVI, with an estimated value of over $12,000. The incident highlighted both the relative obscurity of Bowie's visual art during his lifetime and the growing scholarly and market interest in his paintings following his death.

Other Paintings and Techniques

Beyond the DHead series, Bowie produced landscapes, abstract compositions, and figure studies throughout his career. He worked across multiple media, including charcoal, pastels, watercolors, and computer-assisted techniques. His interest in technology extended to his visual art practice, where he experimented with early digital tools and explored the intersection of traditional and electronic image-making.

Bowie also created album artwork and design concepts for his own records, though he typically collaborated with professional designers and photographers for finished album covers. His sketches and preliminary designs for album art, stage sets, and music videos reveal a visual imagination that was integral to the conception of his musical projects from their earliest stages.

Exhibitions and Public Reception

Bowie exhibited his paintings publicly on several occasions during the mid-1990s, including shows in London and New York. Critical reception was mixed: some reviewers praised the genuine painterly quality of the work, while others struggled to separate the paintings from Bowie's celebrity status. Bowie himself expressed awareness of this difficulty, noting that his fame made it nearly impossible for critics to evaluate his visual art on its own terms.

The David Bowie Isexhibition (2013–2018), though primarily focused on his music, costumes, and stage designs, included examples of his visual art and helped establish a broader public awareness of his painting practice. Following his death, his visual art has received increasing scholarly attention, with several of his paintings included in exhibitions that contextualize them within the broader tradition of musicians who paint, alongside works by John Lennon, Joni Mitchell, and Bob Dylan.

The Relationship Between Art and Music

For Bowie, painting and music were not separate activities but complementary expressions of a unified artistic sensibility. He described painting as a way of processing ideas and emotions that music could not fully capture, and he used visual art as a means of working through concepts that would later find expression in songs and albums. The relationship between his art collecting, his painting, and his music was one of continuous cross-pollination.

The visual thinking that painting cultivated is evident throughout Bowie's musical career. His approach to costume design, stage production, and album artwork demonstrated a visual sophistication that few musicians of any era have matched. In this sense, Bowie's paintings are not a footnote to his musical career but a window into the broader artistic intelligence that made his music possible.