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Illustrator Profile - Tim Bower: "I work traditionally"

By Robert Newman   Thursday October 13, 2016

Tim Bower is an Eastern Pennsylvania-based illustrator and educator who has created editorial illustrations for countless magazines and newspapers. Bower says he works primarily in the editorial world, because he enjoys “the visual link to journalism and being viable in the here and now.” His work is smart and funny and playful, created with pen and ink, watercolor and gouache, which Bower describes as “the most misunderstood medium that I know.” In addition to teaching at Syracuse and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, in recent years Bower has also been creating a series of striking paintings.

MY LIFE:
I grew up on a farm near Lansing, Michigan.

After art school in San Francisco, and living there and in New York City for 20 years, I moved to eastern Pennsylvania 10 years ago. My wife and I had an old farmhouse restored in a valley that splits the difference between suburban and rural. It’s beautiful here, small towns dotted with stone houses and barns connected by cornfields, with winding roads and creeks everywhere. It’s a world away from NYC, but close enough for when we miss our old neighborhood in Brooklyn Heights.

I’ve been an illustrator for 25 years but it feels like five, mostly because the industry keeps changing, and so does my work. I started painting seriously a few years ago, (an undertaking that coincided with the birth of my daughter, which I’m told has obvious significance, but eludes me) to explore the subjectivity of art and provide contrast/balance to the necessary objectivity of illustration. The two fight with each other incessantly, but it’s a constructive battle that ultimately benefits both.

MY WORKSPACE:
My studio is in what was historically known as a summer kitchen—a small frame house used for cooking that’s separate from the main house. We connected ours, and I use the main floor space to paint and the upstairs office for illustration. 

HOW I MAKE MY ILLUSTRATIONS:
I work traditionally, and in a variety of mediums: pen and ink, watercolor, acrylic, but mostly gouache. Gouache is the most misunderstood and therefore underutilized medium I know, when in fact it’s the most versatile, liberating stuff around. A few years ago I learned some Photoshop and started coloring my ink drawings with digital color, but that just sort of fell away. The tactile nature of paint has always been my preference, as smearing and scraping just happen as a natural part of the process. I have yet to make the intuitive connection to pixels on a tablet, but really appreciate the efficiency of having digital means available for adjustments.

MY FIRST BIG BREAK:
That goes back to art school. I willed all the courage I could muster and took a binder of xeroxed black and white samples up to the art department of the San Francisco Chronicle (images derived from articles in their paper), and left with two manuscripts due the next day. That became an occasional thing, and led to a part-time job filling in for the staff illustrators when they took vacations. I learned that the process of producing an illustration under deadline involved practical concerns, and that realization added a needed pragmatism to the experimental methods I was exploring in classes. I still have a big debt of gratitude to Dennis Gallagher who hired me, and then staff illustrators Bill Cone, Debbie Drechsler and others for making a nervous kid feel welcome. The experience gave me the confidence and eagerness to leave school early and head to NYC with a portfolio of printed work.

MY INFLUENCES:
From a foundational perspective, it was my dad. Working for him on his farm from early grade school until I left home after high school taught a work ethic that influenced my perception of how to make the uncertainties of an art career viable. Compared to other prospects, I learned that illustration was a facet of art that allowed for individual autonomy and some degree of rational return on effort. There was substance in being able to make an appointment, show your portfolio, and leave with immediate prospects based on the merit and relevance of your work. My dad also had a significant effect on my development in an indirect way. Indirect, because he wasn’t educated in art, and we never talked about art, but he has an innate ability to see dimensional form and draw it. Growing up I’d see casual drawings on his desk of mechanical things he was working out in his head, and random scribbles that described form. They weren’t rendered, and were utterly unselfconscious, but highly descriptive even to my naive eye. When I was in high school I made posters for sporting events that attempted to depicted our mascot pummeling the opponent’s mascot, always from the same rote stock pose—they were pretty lazy efforts but that’s all I had. In my room one evening, I found a half dozen drawings of that Fighting Bee, each from a different angle, all in various dynamic poses. That changed everything for me—it was profound. Simultaneously humbled and inspired, that was the day that I realized I needed to learn how to see, and I was a long way from it. I never asked my dad about those drawings, and he in typical fashion didn’t mention them either but the message they conveyed was clear, and is still for me, the essence of dynamic drawing—get it from your head, and understand it well enough to effectively convey your impression of it. Years later, he claimed to not remember anything about them.

MY MOST ADMIRED CREATIVE PERSON:
A friend I’ve known for a long time. After college he built his own house and started a business crafting custom-forged metal structures for architecture. He’s also a visual artist and continues to produce prolifically for himself with little consideration given to the prospect of showing. His paintings and sculptures now are as intuitively pure and original as the first one I saw 30 years ago. Admiration comes in different degrees, and on varying levels, and the criteria for assessing it has shifted for me over time. I’m beginning now to see the practice of art and it's possibilities through his wider lens.

MY CREATIVE INSPIRATION:
Comics: For better or worse, comic books have stuck with me. I never read them, but learned how to “draw” from the mainstream books of the 70s and 80s. After realizing that that influence was contradictory to sound drawing, I had to unlearn it. Later, with a better understanding of the art form’s worth, I came upon comics from the 40s and 50s which revealed their inherent cinematic appeal and have everything their offspring lost—a candid, often unschooled, individual workmanlike manner about the drawing, a slow narrative, flat basic color, and humility.

Music: I don't create music, but consume and play it constantly, and it increasingly amazes me the close parallels it walks to visual art. It’s sound that progressively informs and motivates the formal aspects of images I make, especially when working intuitively. Even when the working mode is results-oriented, as in illustration, it’s an effective well to tap.

Words: Content-wise, the subconscious cross-pollination that derives from a lifelong habit of reading fiction and nonfiction concurrently continues to produce interesting fodder for the narrative/concept aspects of picture making. It’s sort of like a contained, useful schizophrenia.

For me, visual art, music and literature are all indispensable and interchangeable.          

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE OF WORKING ALONE:
It isn’t a challenge, and in fact one of the best aspects of making art. A challenge would be going to the office every day. Working on my own doesn’t mean isolation or disconnect in any way.

A MEMORABLE ASSIGNMENT FROM THE PAST YEAR:
A logo for a BBQ restaurant in South Carolina, The Dixie Pig. One of the partners, who’s also the chef, contacted me after seeing my work in a magazine. The whole experience was so unorthodox in terms of standard illustration protocol; I found it refreshing. They envisioned using a full color painted version of the logo in supplement to the standard graphic version, and I liked that unconventional take on identity.

DREAM ASSIGNMENT:
Ten grand to stay home with my daughter for a week painting. She’s five years old, and kicks my ass when we collaborate.

MY FAVORITE ART DIRECTOR:
Illustration is loaded with excellent people that I’m privileged to work with. The list would span years and take up all my space here, but a current client worth noting is Garden & Gun magazine creative director Marshall McKinney and art director Braxton Crim. I’ve been doing a monthly assignment for them for years, the “Southern Agenda” that covers notable regional events throughout the South. Each month requires that my image incorporate the shape of the state that hosts the featured event. It’s a challenge because design and concept are so intrinsically linked. I’ve either got a long lucky steak going, or they’re Southern gentlemen to a fault, but the process is usually one-sketch-to-finish. That’s the selfish take on it; the real satisfaction comes from being associated with talent that produces such a handsome, award-winning magazine.  

SOME OF MY FAVORITE ILLUSTRATORS:
When I first started looking at illustration, certain work stood out to me because it stood out from everything else. John Collier’s work always seemed more appropriate in a museum than in a magazine, and Barron Storey and Robert Weaver similarly made work that always elicited something beyond the pop culture venue it occupied. Their work hit a visceral note that transcended the status quo. When I began working, I soon realized that I couldn’t consistently achieve this level under the constraints of deadlines and dictated texts, and that made me respect work that could even more. Today there are a few illustrators, among them Vivienne Flesher, Robert Andrew Parker and Barry Blitt that are to me, exceptional in that rare way.

OTHER WORK:
I’ve always worked primarily within editorial. The reason for pursuing illustration from the start for me was the visual link to journalism and being viable in the here and now, commenting on pop discourse. Working on character design for Blue Sky Studios’ film Epic was a rewarding experience that resulted in an Outstanding Animated Character nomination by The Visual Effects Society. The artists that turned my sketches into virtual reality are talented beyond my comprehension.

The most significant added dimension to my day-to-day has been teaching. Jeffrey Smith gave me my first opportunity at the (then) Academy of Art in San Francisco, and subsequent stints at SVA in NYC and now at Syracuse University and the University of the Arts in Philadelphia have hooked me. I focus my classes on replacing preconceived notions of what illustration is with the latent, intuitively unique version that young artists all have in their heads.

HOW I STAY CURRENT:
The editorial illustration industry has changed a lot recently, but not as much as I have. I’m fortunate to have sufficient work coming in, and it seems to take care of itself despite the fact that I don’t consciously pursue alternative directions. Remaining in forward motion—keeping illustration and personal work linked in some way—works for now.

HOW I PROMOTE MYSELF:
I’ve rarely promoted myself beyond the standard means. By simply hanging around long enough, I seem to have maintained a presence. I have one foot in social media, and also, a great rep.

ADVICE FOR SOMEONE STARTING OUT:
Ask yourself if you have to do it. If you don't, you'll probably be happier and more successful at something else.

See more Tim Bower illustrations, new work and updates:
Tim Bower website
Tim Bower paintings
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