Stepping into Phillip Timper’s world, one glimpses pure, unfettered imagination. Color, texture, shape and image evoke excitement, humor, irony, and often a delighted exclamation of “Wow!”

Currently a resident of the high mountain desert town of Prescott, Arizona, Phil is working on the cutting edge of a digital technique that blends traditional media with the tools of computing to create mind-blowing images that are surreal and challenging - yet oddly familiar to anyone who looks deeply at the work. After scanning his original watercolors and drawings and digitizing the paint, he then further pushes the envelope by adding elements created on the computer using a variety of software and the technical mastery Phil has developed over many years of work.

Phil’s formal training took place at the University of Illinois, Edwardsville, where he spent his time drawing and painting. Today he reluctantly admits that academics were a secondary consideration for him at the beginning of his college years. Although academics did become an important part of his education, his immersion into art still found him at the fine art campus far more often than at the main campus. “College taught me I could develop my creativity. Creativity is a skill like dancing or riding a bike, one can learn to be more creative. Think of it as a muscle in your head, it just needs exercise...”.

After college, an opportunity to work in the same studio as his father, also an artist at what was then AT&T, exposed Phil to traditional commercial graphics and design. Stepping into the very different world of corporate promotions was made easy with the help of his father and a dozen other artists happy to mentor a quick study. Phil’s natural drawing styles became welcome skills in the group’s mix. The commercial art principles and “board skills” he acquired there enhanced his already considerable abilities which provided a productive career. Ten years later, while still working in commercial illustration and graphics, Phil began using a Macintosh computer. This was at the same time the Mac was transforming the graphic industry, and this is, as they say, where the story really became interesting.

Having discovered surrealism in high school and naturally tempted with the potential imaging software represented, Phil knew there was magic to be made in the marriage of traditional and technical. Computer integration offered an opportunity to meld his traditional classical skills with ideas that demanded a medium that could reproduce images, textures, shapes and color of another world. Opportunity met capability and powered by his spirit, the art blossomed.

Phil describes this process as “Today’s chaotic culture, processed through my psycho-blender and poured out in pixels.”

We live in the midst of a modern world that has seen information and sensory stimulation reach a calamitous cacophony previously unknown. Phil sees culture, particularly American, as an absurd blizzard of over-stimulation, and maintains that it blinds us. “The world swirls around us, so much input numbs us from seeing what is reality happening around us. Numb and anesthetized is a fundamentally flawed way to live.” The surreal world Phil illuminates with pixels mirrors that chaos. It is his belief that we all have an ability to see how un-naturally preoccupied our daily life really is, but that many are so conditioned and overwhelmed by the barrage of modern culture that the chaos passes for normal.

Basing his work in traditional theory gives Phil’s work an aesthetic that invites a rapport with his audience, while allowing the technology he has mastered to set his imagination free.

Those whose experiences lead them to believe digital art is “generated” by a computer, not by a human, are challenged to consider the computer as just another tool in the artist’s quiver, or as Phil likes to say, “just a paintbrush on Electro-Luminescent Steroids!” But whatever the assigned definition for his art might be, seeing it is ultimately believing in visual thrill-rides.

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