Phillip Timper

I was lucky to have had a painting teacher at an early age. She told me on the first day, “ If you can draw, you can paint, you just have to learn color.” She opened a door for me – and I walked through and haven’t stopped.
Today I am indulging in an old love: lavish, thick paint. The act of mixing and applying the oils in heavy strokes with a pallet knife has hidden within it “art inside the art”. The knife technique is one my painting teacher, June Kelly, introduced me to in the first year of training. As a kid, using the knife to layer paint tapped into something beyond depicting a subject. Somehow the interplay between deliberate manipulation and the randomness of what the paint did on the canvas, became a kind of magic for me. Riding the delicate interplay of paint application, in the context of rendering a subject, seemed to transform wildly random paint swirls into the details of an old building or a landscape.
That magical interplay is the art inside the art. The balance between control and serendipity, and the flowing motions inside each stroke make up the total act of painting. The present moment inside that balance is why painters keep painting. Now that is how to spend a lifetime…
– Phillip Timper