In Pursuit of Rainbows and War

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

Malibu Magazine: Did a specific artist, class, person push you toward deciding that painting was your destiny?
Phil Bower: Yeah. I remember seeing slides of German expressionists — people like Kirchner and Kandinsky, and groups like Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). I had a reaction to the way that they expressed themselves, the freedom of color and the power of the images they used. Coming from L.A., I didn’t really know what my identity was, but I liked looking at painters who were struggling against things like fascism and world wars, and the way that they’d create paintings that were narratives or metaphors about their experiences. I kind of wished that I had that history to talk about, something that was so interesting and big, something that people would be talking about forever. A lot of it was horrible and scary, but they lived during interesting times.

MM: Why do you choose photographs and film stills from history as your source of inspiration?
PB: (Bower reads an excerpt from his master’s thesis) “For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by the power of human history as documented by stills and snapshots. The random discovery of moments in the lives of complete strangers from a time that existed and was gone instantly gave me an indescribable feeling in the pit of my stomach. Somehow, these windows into the adventures of strangers, often in times and places that I’ve never known, gave me a stronger sense of intimacy than all of the self-reflection I’ve ever done.”

MM: Why do you think that you find intimacy within the lives of others and not within your own?
PB: I had this show that opened Sept. 9, 2001. The whole show was based on photographs of Southern California people and landscapes around L.A. It was an investigation into being cool, machismo and dandyism. The first business day that the exhibit opened was Sept. 11. Obviously, no one was interested in going. For weeks afterwards, there was only one thing that people were interested in looking at and that was their television. I looked at the show after I reacted to 9/11, and it seemed so petty and self-obsessed to talk about what’s going on with me or my take on the world around me. I had always been interested in photographs and historical film stills. I had based paintings on them in the past. It opened up the idea that I could do all of the personal reflection and expression by painting in my style, using my palette or choosing the compositions. But as for the imagery, I didn’t want it to be about the inside of my head anymore.

MM: How do you find the film stills or photographs that you choose to paint?
PB: There is a Web site called http://www.BritishPathe.com. It’s a film service that has digitally archived decades of documentaries, educational films and obscure newsreels (online) where you can go through the films frame-by-frame. So these images don’t exist as photographs. They are frames within a movie, so it’s like I’m taking the photograph myself. It feels very personal because I’m searching these archives and historical databases, and finding a frame that no one else has probably ever considered. It’s this random human event that is lost amongst billions and billions of other images that are out there in the universe. And I’m taking it from obscurity — this lost memory — and giving it a glorious new rebirth by lavishing all this attention on it.

MM: How do you decide which images to commit to canvas?
PB: I look for something with some ambiguity that isn’t the kind of thing that would be staged in a portrait for Life magazine, but looks more candid and obscure. And then I look for something that compositionally would be an interesting painting and has nice contrast and isn’t too detailed. I usually look for something that is blurred from the movement being captured on film. I like to take the frames that have a lot of blur in it so that there is this mystery to the form, and I can then throw my own interpretation into it. I tend to look for action where people are engaged in some kind of pursuit. Also, a lot of the images that I choose, even though they are not my experience, I can see myself living those experiences.

MM: Does the action that you are seeking in the images relate to a personal belief that life itself should be action-oriented?
PB: Yes. It’s the act of being alive. And that is what is odd about all of these people who are just living their lives when they are captured on a photographic negative. There is something really melancholy about it because most of these people are ghosts. They are dead. But there is something very optimistic too, like, “Look! Here is their life.”

MM: Is there a theme that runs through your work?
PB: I tend to gravitate toward images that have a physicality in the scene and strong male or female roles. I love scenes of war. I’m not interested in historicizing anything like a specific battle or even taking sides, but instead I like to present periods when everything was on the line — the world was being decided. And I like to paint the scene in a way that doesn’t take into account how serious the event was. I like to have the underlying image of what is occurring have the impact, but paint it as if it’s a vase of flowers when instead it’s people at war.

MM: Which painting most embodies what the exhibit was about?
PB: It’s that one (Bower points to a canvas hanging in his living room), The Winner. The image itself is victory after a struggle. I like the tone of it.

MM: Is there a particular one of your paintings that is personally meaningful to you — a painting that you keep revisiting?
PB: There is the one I did of the guys with their backs to us who are looking at the forest and the trees are all of the colors of the rainbow. I like to remember using that kind of palette on normal, everyday subject matter. I love rainbows. I like painting little rainbows or referring to rainbows in the palette or in different areas of the painting. I don’t know … rainbows are the coolest. They are God’s covenant with man that he’ll never flood the earth again. In the Bible, isn’t
that what rainbows are supposed to be? When you see a rainbow, it’s God saying, “Yeah, I went a little overboard with the whole flooding-the-earth thing, and a rainbow is my way of saying I’m never going to overreact like that again.” I also refer back to 1941, the painting of the soldiers running into the rubble. I think it’s the perfect blend of this kind of subject matter and the disregard of the historical seriousness of it. I made their uniforms each a primary color. And if you look closely at the rocks, you can see that they are painted like Lucky Charms. I find that a successful blending of my concept and technique.

MM: What photograph from your own life would you choose to paint and give a “glorious new rebirth”?
PB: I saw it the other day. When I was 10 years old, I got sent away to camp. I guess it was a tough year for me. My parents were on the verge of divorce, and there were a lot of issues. I looked at this group photo of, like, 700 kids. They were all wearing white shirts and smiling, and there I was in the middle wearing this dark Lacoste Tshirt with my arms crossed, looking so angry and disgusted with everything. I look at that photo, and I love little Phil. I would want to paint that picture so that it communicates the message: Everything is going to be OK, dude. You are going to survive this.

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