Dallas chef Kenny Bowers does (charitable) painting on the side

When he was in elementary school in suburban Boston, Kenny Bowers — the chef and founder of Dallas restaurants such as Kenny's Wood Fired Grill and Kenny's Burger Joint — loved coloring time, when everyone got crayons and a book, with the wide white pages featuring outlined animals and landscapes.

But he couldn’t color inside the lines.

Decades later, Bowers still can’t keep his lines straight. But he’s used his love for art to launch a powerful enterprise, creating a series of paintings that are not only colorful and compelling, but have also earned $52,000 in donations to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Like many chefs, Bowers possesses a strong creative streak — but it took many years before he found an outlet in painting.

Longtime Dallas diners remember Bowers' first days at restaurants such as Daddy Jack’s Lobster & Chowder House and Big Fish Little Fish. In 2006, he opened the phenomenally popular Kenny's Wood Fired Grill in Addison, spawning a Kenny's empire: Kenny’s Burger Joint, Kenny’s Italian Kitchen, and Kenny’s East Coast Pizza.

But he always nurtured that passion for visual art.

“I have a wild imagination and my mind works in pictures, it’s big-time visual,” Bowers says. “I used to collect art and go to galleries. I'd cooked for so long, and it didn’t light me up as it once did."

He went to Michael’s and bought supplies, taking the same approach he'd taken with cooking, embarking with no formal training, but fueled by a passion: dabbing and musing, creating and savoring the purity of the experience.

On a trip to the East Coast on Thanksgiving in 2018, he showed his work to a relative who had a background in art.

"She said, 'This is very Pollock'," he says. "I had no idea what she was talking about."

The compliment was lost on Bowers, who researched Jackson Pollock, the abstract expressionist painter known for his vivid canvases with pools and streaks of paint that convey movement and emotion.

Encouraged, he converted an office in his house to a studio. Painting came to represent something he could do for himself and by himself — for a change.

“In restaurants, everything you do is to please people,” he says. “It’s a bridge between what you like and what the public likes. There are very few chefs who are doing this for what only they want. But for art, I can do whatever I want. It’s so liberating; I only have to please myself.”

His next step was to let people see the work, even if he felt certain any nonpartisan viewer would think “it looked like something a five-year-old would do.”

In late 2020, he hung some of his work on a wall in his Kenny's Wood Fired Grill in Addison. His flagship eatery was upscale, had some room and he figured, correctly, that at least he would get the right eyeballs.

He's now sold about 150 paintings. Buyers include customers, friends, restaurant industry colleagues, collectors.

"I have a wall with three paintings hanging at a time," he says. "If people like the painting, they make a donation that goes straight to St. Jude's, and they take the painting home."

A painting costs about $300 — "or best offer, so people can negotiate, because for some people, that's fun," he says.

A dedicated website, Kenny Bowers Art, allows followers and collectors to check him out and buy work for sale. He paints every day — oil, acrylic, and mixed media, though mostly acrylic, and he loves nature, particularly flowers and butterflies, which are among his bestsellers.

"Since I started, I've gone through different phases but I seem to always come back to florals," he says. "I love flowers and the colors, but I also love what they represent: They're resilient. They die, they come back — I've gone through challenges, and I love the idea that you just keep trying."