Meet Patrick Bower

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrick Bower a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Patrick with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?

There’s something in midwestern culture that values just showing up. Not necessarily excelling. Just finding satisfaction in the doing. I suppose I soaked up that notion growing up in Indiana. I came from a family where nothing came particularly easily. There wasn’t any money, so anything that I wanted, I had to work for. And more than that—I had to prove that the thing was valuable enough to me to endure the effort. When I entered the art community, first through playing music, I was drawn to indie bands like Guided By Voices whose mythos was wrapped up in their work ethic. They put out two records a year, toured incessantly, and still had day jobs. That tempered my expectations off a life in the arts. I don’t expect a big break. I just show up to my studio every day.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I’m an artist living in Brooklyn, NY. I also help organize exhibitions with Immaterial Projects, a curatorial collective I co-founded with five other amazing artists: Naomi Basu, Pilar Lagos, Tracie Lee, Cait Reid and Robert Zurer.

My work draws on the bodily experience of extreme emotional events and the after images they leave behind. As a kid, I struggled with night terrors. I would wake up in a panic, my brain churning with formless anxiety and swirling images. I learned that getting out of bed and making a drawing that represented the sensations I was experiencing could help quiet my mind.

This process of translating physical sensations into visual compositions is still at the heart of what I make. Now that I’m older, it becomes a kind of exercise in awareness, locating the somatic markers that indicate mood and feeling and allowing those to expand into color and form in my imagination.

The idea of touch is also important to my process. I build up layers of texture with gesso, marble dust and pumice. I push washes of color across the surface. Because I work on unstretched canvas, edges curl and warp, and the pieces generally refuse to hang politely on the wall. It’s a way of freeing the image from the picture plane and, in a way, returning those original sensations to the physical world. I wish I could let everyone touch my work.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

I always say that my main talent is the willingness to look foolish. I make things, I share them. Sometimes they’re well received, sometimes not. Sometimes I look back and cringe at my decisions. But I just keep going. It doesn’t mean that I don’t feel embarrassed or discouraged or a fraud. I just push through it.

In terms of the foundations that support my work, I’m really happy that I got a liberal education in college. I didn’t go to art school. I studied literature, I read, I wrote. And I was exposed to ideas in a variety of disciplines. It’s kept me curious and engaged.

Another thing that’s essential for my work is community. I surround myself with good people who share my values and challenge me. We share in each other’s successes, and support each other through challenges. I couldn’t do it alone.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

About ten years ago, I came across a poem by Robert Duncan that continues to reveal itself to me in ways that nurtures my creative work. It’s called “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” It begins:

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.patrickbowerart.com
• Instagram: @patrickbowerart