Brian Dowdall’s Animal Spirit paintings revealed his view that animals are "pure spirits of the earth." In the mid-1960s he left home for San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district where he lived a "dharma-vagabond existence," sleeping in Golden Gate Park and communing with other free spirits. His subsequent paintings of animals are lyrical, often whimsical, and always dreamy and slightly nightmarish. Besides animals, Dowdall painted goddesses whom he revered as "supreme beings whose spirits are ever-present."