Les 'Bear Man' Phillips

I began my artistic career drawing, finger painting and making things from clay. I was six. Several years later I entered college and studied drawing, painting and sculpture. I was good at it because I had previous experience.

I was influenced by a particular art teacher, a true free spirit. He encouraged me to use unconventional materials and techniques. I began making art using such things as food, snow, live animals... Needless to say, not many artifacts remain. It occurred to me during this time that perhaps I should document some of these ephemeral masterpieces.

I bought a little Pentax K1000 and began taking slides of my work. I took photos as if, (loosely quoting Dorothea Lange), I were going blind tomorrow. I took a lot of photos, had them developed and threw them into a box with the intention of going through them later to pick out the masterpieces. Well, living in foggy San Francisco, and not having been taught how to care for photos or negatives, they soon became one large chunk of photographic detritus.

I went back to drawing, painting and making things from clay..

While in college I became interested in computers. It was 1983 and by then it was obvious that computers were going to be around awhile. I entered the Conceptual Design program at San Francisco State University and earned a Bachelor's degree with a concentration in computer applications to the arts. Now this was cool and I loved it and all and I learned that I could keep all my stuff on a computer disk and it wouldn't turn into anything other than digital detritus, which by the way, is a good description of most computer generated art of the time. None of those disks can be used in modern computers so they may as well be one large chunk of plastic detritus.

After taking a couple years off to travel and finger paint, I returned to SFSU and earned a Master's degree in Educational Technology. After escaping from college, I taught art and computers and worked at a variety of artistic endeavors.

So that's some background for what I'm doing now. I use a digital camera, dual processor G4 Macintosh, and a variety of technical toys to do my finger painting. I take photos as if I were going blind tomorrow, put them into Photoshop, play around with them, print them either as C prints or Giclée, frame them and before I can turn them into detritus they're hanging on a wall. I love it!