In Pursuit of Rainbows and War

By: Maxine Hurt | June 05, 2009 | Art Profile

“I’m a really sensitive guy, so please be nice to me.” That’s the last thing 41-year-old Los Angeles painter Phil Bower said to me before I left his sparse art studio apartment in Silver Lake. He smiled, revealing an endearing gap between his front teeth as mid-morning sunlight pierced the locks of his brick-red hair. The scent of aged hardwood floors dappled with paint floated around the room. Bower’s cat, an unwanted inheritance from a past girlfriend, whined relentlessly from an adjacent room: Post breakup, Bower didn’t have the heart to kick the poor thing out.



Yeah, he’s a sensitive guy. Just moments before his joking plea, I listened to Bower, who “grew up fast” in West L.A., describe his all-time favorite film scene: the final nostalgia-laden frames from Italian coming-of-age classic, Cinema Paradiso. During the sequence, the protagonist returns to his hometown a successful film director to find that his deceased mentor Alfredo, the kindhearted film projectionist at the Cinema Paradiso, has left him a final bequest: a film reel with the hundreds of kissing scenes that the town priest edited from the movies played at the small theater over the years. Our hero, watching the scenes alone in a dark theater, finally seems to grasp the meaning of it all—the unsaid complexities of friendship, love, innocence, fate and the journey of life — then the word “Fine” shimmers on the screen.

“I could cry about it right now — the kind of cry where you feel so good afterwards.” (Bower unconsciously puts his hand over his heart, and I spot a fierce-looking tattoo climbing up one of his toned arms.)

After viewing paintings from his 2008 exhibit at the Kidder Smith Art Gallery in Boston titled New Paintings, I could see why that scene, which depicts a pivotal moment in a man’s life, stuck with Bower. The painter’s collection of oil paintings reflects similar essential life moments that he carefully hand-selected after searching through millions of historical film stills and photographs. The people in his chosen images, long dead, are pursuing life with vigor, ambition and vivacity — or an effortless cool that seems to circumvent death. There is glory or the promise of it in each dual-toned image that Bower translates onto his canvas. But before nostalgia rides in on hues of black-and-white, Bower does something jarringly contemporary — he adorns his paintings with iridescent, Fauvism-inspired colors that set an optimistic tone and defy the morbidity of ghosts. These are, after all, the works of a man who told me that “rainbows are the coolest.”

Under the influence of Mexican coffee (courtesy of Bower), the sensitive artist spoke to Malibu Magazine about why a guy who grew up during the 20th century in an “idyllic, reality show” landscape paints ghosts and yesteryears, rainbows and war.

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