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At 84, artist John E. Dowell, Jr. is still creating and challenging existing assumptions.

"Can you paint silence?" he asks.

He's experimenting with texture for a new work called "Hope".

"I like discovering and finding things that I think you have not seen," he says.

Dowell tells Action News anchor Tamala Edwards he knew he wanted to be an artist since "second or third grade." He graduated from Temple University's Tyler School of Art in 1963, where he learned printmaking, etching, painting and sculpture.

"I had a range of interests coming through," he says.

Dowell continued his studies on a grant in California.

"I was trained on how to print lithographs," he says.

Many of his works are at his ho

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