Making art is not one of the usual things that comes to mind when thinking about what fathers and sons share. But two father-son art exhibitions in Pittsburgh show how strong that tie can be.

Pittsburghers Robert Bowden and Paul Bowden are at Mendelson Gallery, Shadyside, and Kamal Youssef and Hisham Youssef, who live near Indiana, are at Christine Frechard Gallery, Squirrel Hill.

Contrary to what sometimes happens when children make career decisions, both fathers are delighted with the choices their offspring made, and neither son felt pressured to become or not become an artist.

"I knew when Paul was very young -- when he was 2 or 3 years old -- that he had this gift. It was there," Robert Bowden says.

Kamal Youssef was also pleased when Hisham started coming to his studio to watch his father work when he was 6 or 7 years old. "When he was 9, I taught him how to weld."

All four men share a passion that feeds their creativity, but you couldn't tell who was related to whom by looking at their artworks; both fathers are painters and both sons are sculptors.

Robert Bowden's courtly realist watercolors of sites local and abroad are familiar to visitors to the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annuals, and many know his handsome pocket-sized books that reproduce scenes of Pittsburgh, Block Island, Martha's Vineyard and, most recently, Manhattan.

After graduating from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) with a degree in painting and design, Bowden, who turned 77 on Thanksgiving, painted in the abstract style then in vogue.

"My parents were very encouraging. They didn't know how I'd make a living, but they didn't worry about it."

Only much later, and after 10 years of trial and error, did the Point Breeze resident feel sufficiently comfortable with the demanding watercolor medium to begin to exhibit and sell those paintings, he says.

He founded a graphic design business in 1963 -- that he still works on projects with -- and drew on the expertise he'd gained to eventually found, with his wife Diane, Hydrangia Books. Most recently, he completed a 19-by-8-foot mural in oil for American Bridge that he painted from scaffolding.

Bowden wanted his son to do "whatever he wanted to do. I didn't want to influence him. To be in any creative field -- theater, dance, art -- it's really difficult to make a living, and you have to really want to do it."

Son Paul, 51, has exhibited in recent Three Rivers Arts Festival Annual exhibitions and his public artwork, "Meeting/Departure," is permanently installed in Polish Hill, where he resides. He is also an illustrator for Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Mammals Department.

He says he knew from the beginning he wanted to be an artist. "Since my dad was a graphic artist, he painted a lot. That inspired me. My family had always been supportive, and I figured I could be an artist, too. I didn't know how hard it was until it was too late."

Trips to Italy when he was young exposed him to classical art while visits to Carnegie Internationals encouraged an "openness to contemporary art."

Having studied drawing and painting as an undergraduate, Paul was won over by sculpture during a year abroad in Italy. He stayed for nine additional years, working with mentor Paolo Carosone, and his sculpture is technically exacting while evocatively contemporary.

Paul's male figures, for example, are anatomically refined but reveal their ribs in a very nonidealized way, and seem to struggle, sometimes from a prone position, with the untenable weight of existence. Paul says, "I wanted to keep it ambiguous. I've left them nude so that I wouldn't be suggesting anything with the clothing." Moreso, they are naked -- and vulnerable.

Kamal Youssef was born in 1923 in Cairo, Egypt, and his artistic ability was recognized from an early age. His father, however, a successful textile merchant, guided him to study engineering, so that he would have a profession with which to make a living.

While his education provided him a more reliable career by which to support his family, it didn't dissuade him from art. Kamal became a member of the Cairo avant-garde, and exhibited in a Venice Biennale. In 1957, he began working as an engineer for Swindell-Dressler in Pittsburgh, but he continued his artmaking.

"He would get up pre-work and paint, and he would paint when he got home," his son says.

Kamal's paintings, usually figural, are intense and in ways timeless, their blocked areas of fiery color and graphic composition reflecting his origin in a culture both sun-seared and ancient.

A 2006 retrospective given him by the University Museum, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was followed last year by a traveling exhibition at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art. Paintings at the gallery also represent a range of years, from 1951 to the present.

Hisham Youssef, who received the Tillie S. Speyer Award for his sculpture in this year's Associated Artists of Pittsburgh Annual Exhibition, lives in Smicksburg, Indiana County, just a mile or so from his parents' home in Dayton, Armstrong County.

He's also a furniture maker, works on film projects as a member of local film workers union IATSE No. 489, and is skilled in building construction and design, specialty restoration and fabrication.

His father neither held him back nor encouraged him to become an artist. "My example from my father is that you can have a job and be a parent and do art. You don't have to give up art. It was a normal thing," he says.

Hisham, 50, was enriched by art books and other publications his parents had at home, but he also learned more practical lessons as a child.

"My dad gave me a good eye for junk" he says with a smile. Before it was "fashionable," he and his father would cruise the streets for discarded goods, some of which have found their way into Hisham's mixed-media works.

"I still use material collected when I was a kid in the things I make."

His real affinity, though, is for wood, and the sculpture in the exhibition is made of woods harvested from his property. Each is lovingly identified -- pear, black walnut, etc.

"Wood," Hisham says, "makes my hands feel good. Steel, stone make my hands sore."

Kamal says proudly that his son taught him "about the wood like it was something very alive. When he looks at wood, it's amazing how he discovers what's inside. ...

"He knows every type of wood. He's really thinking about the value of the wood, the importance of the wood, and how to work with it."

What becomes evident in conversations with these men, aside from their geniality and full embrace of life, is that fathers influence sons in ways they can't begin to imagine, and sons absorb lessons from their dads that only time will reveal.

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