Patrick Bower: Save Yourself - Artist Statement

 

Save Yourself, by Patrick Bower

As a kid, I struggled with night terrors. I would wake up in a panic, my brain churning with formless anxiety. I soon learned that getting out of bed and making a drawing that represented the sensations I was experiencing could help quiet my mind. Once it was on the page, the tension lived there, not inside me. This process of translating physical sensations into visual compositions remains at the heart of my work. It’s a way of figuring out whatever I’ve absorbed from the people and things around me: From my body to the canvas.
 
I usually express these sensations as figures, but I look most closely at formal considerations. How do the shapes and lines interact with each other and with the space of the canvas? Where is the push, where is the pull? When I look at these structures, can I feel it in my body? And what do these people or objects mean to me?
 
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.

Pictured: Patrick Bower - Intertwined - Acrylic on canvas - 39" x 26" - 2023