“By the end of the 1960s, after a formative trip to Brazil to photograph the Djuka people in Suriname, Cowans returned to New York City with a passion for his burgeoning painting practice. Deeply rooted in Abstract Expressionism, Cowans’s early works are defined not by the use of brushes, but rather more experimental methods such as by his use of combs and custom made beveled glass squeegees to create sweeping patterns that give the works a fluid sense of motion. The “comb paintings” are directly influenced by Cowans’s photographs of water, the artist’s desire to use paint as the subject as opposed to creating an image of something else using paint. Cowans cites Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, and Wifredo Lam as influences, and points to a group of Contemporary artists of the time including Jack Whitten, Peter Bradley, Daniel Johnson, Bill Hutson, and Edward Clark as fellow painters who all drew inspiration from one another. Cowans had an exhibition at Cinque Gallery, a space dedicated to showing work by established and new African-American artists, and would be become close friends with gallery founder and artist Romare Bearden who asked Cowans to teach him photography.  Bearden would later contribute to the publication Adger Cowans, Personal Vision, published by Glitterati, a monograph spanning fifty years of Cowans’s career. ”