Still, Bowen's managing to send daily e-mails full of anti-Bush information and news of world devastation, forwarding articles on the genocide in Darfur and how the world ignores the massacre. He isn't paying for construction or labor for his Fourth Street space because he's also a carpenter. "And I don't pay for inventory because I've got a house with three floors of unsold art," he laughs. "I get to start off cheap."

So his day's not that bad. Even when he talks about feeling fucked by gallery owners or, worse, ignored, he can't help but chuckle. Sure, he's gotten some exposure over the years. He's shown his paintings --at Philadelphia Art Alliance and Marian Locks in the 1970s; at Catherine Starr in the '90s; as part of the collections at Wills Eye Hospital and InLiquid in the '00s. As a musician, the guitarist/singer raged through garagepunk with the Boneheads and released a solo CD, Variety. But he says his music didn't get heard enough and his paintings didn't get viewed enough.

"Ugh, really nobody would show it," says Bowen, laughing while telling a story about a nameless gallery owner whose wife freaked when she saw Bowen's paintings of women with bulbous breasts. "She told me I was sexist," says Bowen. "Here I was in the mid-1970s doing these goofy big-breasted women compositions in landscapes—what Lisa Yuskavage would make millions off—and I was the bad guy. Humorless fuck. I still have the canvases on the third floor of the house."

His house is a museum of his work, filled with paintings on glass, 3-D collages, intricately detailed dioramas and his more recent work merging Pop and politics in lengthy series like "War & Peace" and "PeopleTIME 2005." They combine the whimsically absurd and the harshly factual—usually on two separate canvases that he later pieces together. Still, no sales.

"Maybe the work was too miserable for galleries trying to sell it as decoration. Maybe these paintings didn't work in slide reproduction and that's why those owners didn't take them. I've heard that from gallery owners." Bowen's lips curl.

He needed to take charge of his own artistic destiny. At the end of 2005, a family member passed, leaving Bowen a small inheritance. On the sunny November day of settlement, Bowen found himself on Fourth Street, coming out of Essene. "Everything converged," says Bowen. He was an artist in full flower, and there, right in front of him, was a big available space in an undervalued neighborhood that used to be the arts-and-crafts capital of Philly. Falling Cow Gallery was born in a charming, off-the-beaten-path area filled with designers and decorators.

"I'm not beneficent. I wanted to make a gallery where I could show and sell my own works as well as have a studio space where I could paint," he says. "I don't want to stand around and twiddle my thumbs. I don't want to be like those kids uptown who buy galleries and set up an easel in the middle of it for show."

So, here he is on another sunny winter day fixing up Falling Cow, where he can show his own works, some based on the Hindu concept of maya and some representing unspeakable sufferings. His diptychlike method was a happy accident. While shopping around for glass on which to paint, he happened onto two interlocking window panes. Inspired, he matched the whimsy of his previous paintings to the political rhetoric of his lyrics. He paired images like a ravaged Katrina street scene on one side with cutesy rabbits on the other—paintings playing off each other with his own brand of dreamy chaos.

For Falling Cow, he's also planning a group show of multimedia artists from Philly and New York, co-curated by his gallery assistants, Kendra Toscano (who works in the prints, drawings and photographs department of the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and Sarah Eberle (Print Center Gallery Store manager).

The Cow is huge enough that he can do installations, film events and sculpture of his own and by others. Is he willing, though, to be like the gallery owners who fucked him forever?

"I can't wait to screw over my first artist," he laughs. "Now, let's talk about Darfur."

Tim Bowen is having a great day.

Tim Bowen's "Dualties" opens Sat., April 1, Falling Cow Gallery, 732 S. Fourth St., 215-923-9767, www.fallingcow.org.