Tom Phillips (artist)

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Tom Phillips

RA
Phillips in Speaking Portraits
Born
Trevor Thomas Phillips

(1937-05-25)25 May 1937
Clapham, London
Died28 November 2022(2022-11-28) (aged 85)
EducationRoyal College of Art
Known forPainting, printmaking and collage
Spouses
  • Jill Purdy
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1961; dissolved 1988)​
  • Fiona Maddocks
    ​
    (m. 1995)​

Trevor Thomas Phillips

RA (25 May 1937 – 28 November 2022) was an English visual artist. He worked as a painter, printmaker and collagist
.

Life

Trevor Thomas Phillips was born on 25 May 1937 in Clapham, London to David and Margaret Phillips (née Arnold). He was the younger of two sons.[1][2][3]

In 1940, the cotton market collapsed and the family had to sell their home. Phillips' father went to work in

leasehold properties as investments and although these did not yield the return that they wished, his mother did buy the freehold of one house, which would later become her son's studio and home.[1]

From 1942 to 1947, Phillips attended Bonneville Road Primary School in Clapham.

First World War, but more significantly he bought himself a piano and started to teach himself to play. In 1957 he became a founder member of the Philharmonia Chorus.[1]

From 1958 to 1960, Phillips read English Literature and

Isis magazine. Upon graduation, he taught Art, Music and English at Aristotle Road School in Brixton, London. He also attended evening classes in life drawing, under Frank Auerbach, and sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts, where he became a full-time student in 1961. When he graduated in 1964 his work was selected for that year's Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London and in the following year, the AIA Galleries in London exhibited his first one-man show. While studying at Camberwell Phillips married Jill, and their daughter Ruth was born in 1964. Their second child was a son, Leo.[1] They would remain married until 1988.[2]

Phillips became a teacher at

Liberal Studies at Walthamstow Polytechnic, where he met the pianist John Tilbury and participated in improvisation concerts at several polytechnics. His first musical composition was Four Pieces for Tilbury.[1]

In 1966 Phillips exhibited at the

Wolverhampton School of Art, and he had a second one-man exhibition, at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. He wrote the opera Irma in the following year and started the Terminal Grey series of paintings.[1]

Throughout the 1970s his works were exhibited widely in one-man shows and collections. After a period as a visiting tutor at the Art School in Kassel, Germany, he abandoned teaching and took his first trip to Africa. In 1973 he began the 20 Sites n Years photographic project. His first significant publication, Works/Texts I, was published in 1975 by Hansjörg Mayer and his first retrospective exhibition toured Europe. This was also the year that he met Marvin and Ruth Sackner, who were to become his patrons and found an archive in Miami to house most of his work. The following year saw the completion of the privately printed edition of A Humument, which had been published in ten sections since 1971.[1]

In 1978 Brian Eno produced a recording of Irma for

Royal Academician.[4] Peter Greenaway and Phillips co-directed A TV Dante with John Gielgud and Bob Peck, which was broadcast on Channel 4 television in 1986. During this time he also collaborated with Malcolm Bradbury, Adrian Mitchell, Jake Auerbach, Richard Minsky and Heather McHugh.[2]

At the beginning of the 1990s Phillips painted portraits of the

Harvard as Artist in Residence at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and published Merely Connect, which he had written with Salman Rushdie during a series of portrait sittings. With the move to a new studio in Bellenden Road and a change of ownership of the Choumert Café, Phillips began to lunch regularly opposite his studio at the Crossroads Café, where he could be found reading literary magazines through his blue-rimmed spectacles.[1]

As part of the

Royal Academy and became their Chairman of Exhibitions.[6] Phillips began to move into new areas in the mid-1990s: stage design, The Postcard Century for Thames & Hudson (building on his passion for postcards[7]), quilting, mud drawings and wire structures. All his old projects continued and he began illustrating Ulysses. He also translated the libretto of Otello while he was designing the English National Opera production. In 1998 Largo Records released Six of Hearts, a CD of Phillips' songs and other music written since 1992 but this went out of print when the label failed in 2002.[2]

By the late 1990s Phillips was an establishment figure in most aspects of the arts. He became a trustee of the

Kennington Oval cricket ground. In 1995, he married the writer Fiona Maddocks, Music Critic of The Observer.[1]

In 2000 he designed lampposts, pavements, gates and arches for Southwark Council's Peckham Renewal Project. Antony Gormley, whose workshop adjoins Phillips' studio in Bellenden Road, Peckham, designed bollards for the same project and the work of both artists adorns that street.[1]

Phillips was made a

2002 Queen's Birthday Honours list.[2]

He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford for 2005–06.[8] In 2006 Phillips exhibited six works in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, among them "Colour Sudoku", and held a Micro-Retrospective (9 February–23 April 2006) at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.[2]

Phillips died on 28 November 2022, at the age of 85.[9][2]

Works

Phillips' best known work is A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel originally by W.H. Mallock. One day, Phillips went to a bookseller's with the express intention of buying a cheap book to use as the basis of an art project. He randomly purchased a novel called A Human Document by Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock, and began a long project of creating art from its pages. He painted, collaged or drew over the pages, leaving some of the text peeking through in serpentine bubble shapes, creating a "found" text with its own story, different from the original. Characters from Mallock's novel appear in the new story, but the protagonist is a new character named "Bill Toge", whose surname can only appear on pages that originally contained words such as "together" or "altogether". Toge's story is a meditation on unrequited love and the struggle to create and appreciate art.

Several editions of A Humument have been published over the years, with more pages being revised each time. The sixth and final edition was published in 2016.[2]

Phillips used the same technique (always with the Mallock source material) in many of his other works, including the illustration of his own translation of

Inferno (published in 1985). He was also fond of re-using images from postcards
(which he avidly collected), as well as drawing stencil-style lettering, freehand. With these works, Phillips used famous pieces of literature and art in his work. The melding of visual art with textual content was a hallmark of his work.

He also painted portraits (his portrait of

Queen Elizabeth II. He was an opera fan, and composed an opera, Irma, using the Humument source material for the libretto. He also wrote the libretto for Heart of Darkness, a chamber opera with music by Tarik O'Regan
currently in development with American Opera Projects.

Phillips engaged in other projects that challenge the viewer's perceptions of art, such as his project 20 Sites n Years, in which he photographed the same 20 spots in his studio's neighborhood, once a year. As the years go by, the viewer watches the neighbourhood gradually change. Similarly, Phillips made a series of paintings called Terminal Greys, consisting of simple cross-hatched bars of murky, grayish paint composed from the leftovers on his palette at the end of each work day. Since there are no aesthetic judgments on the artist's part in the creation of these works, they are virtually mechanical; the "art" could be said to lie in the conception of the work and not in the accidental "grey rainbow" appearance of the result.

He collaborated with film director

Inferno
.

Phillips provided cover art for music albums including Starless and Bible Black by King Crimson (1974), Another Green World by Brian Eno (1975), and one of the 16 portraits that form Peter Blake's design for Face Dances by The Who (1981). The cover art by Phillips for Dark Star's Twenty Twenty Sound (1999) used the same technique as The Humument, but with the album's lyrics as the source material.

Phillips also produced books about art, including Music In Art and a study of African art.

Selected bibliography

Exhibition catalogues

  • Tom Phillips: New and Recent Work [catalogue of the exhibition held at Flowers East 26 November – 24 December 2004], London.
  • We are the People: Postcards from the Collection of Tom Phillips [catalogue of the exhibition held at The Nation Portrait Gallery 2 March- 20 June 2004], London.
  • Fifty Years of Tom Phillips [catalogue of the exhibition held at Flowers 12 March – 4 April 1987], London.

Monographs

  • Paschal, H., & T. Phillips (1992),Tom Phillips: Works and Texts. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.
  • Phillips, T., & N. Rosenthal (2005), Merry Meetings: Drawings and Texts by Toms Phillips. D3 Editions Publishers.
  • Phillips, T. (2012), A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n "Tom Phillips RA (1937 - 2022)". royalacademy.org.uk. 2022.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h Darwent, Charles (29 November 2022). "Tom Phillips obituary". The Guardian.
  3. ^ "Birthday's today". The Telegraph. 25 May 2011. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Mr Tom Phillips, painter, writer and composer, 74.
  4. ^ Karl Fugelso, "Tom Phillips' Dante," in: Cahier Calin: Makers of the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of William Calin, ed. Richard Utz and Elizabeth Emery (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medievalism, 2011), pp. 62–64.
  5. JSTOR 4392677
    .
  6. ^ "Publications – Africa: The Art of a Continent". Tom Phillips. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  7. ^ "Picture This Vintage Postcards The Gallery of Real Life". Chr. Ward London Christopher Ward Magazine (Autumn Winter 2013): 42–45. 2013.
  8. ^ "Oxford Slade Professors, 1870–present" (PDF). University of Oxford. 2012. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 February 2015. Retrieved 27 January 2015.
  9. ^ Tom Phillips CBE RA 25th May 1937 – 28th November 2022
  10. ^ "The Hunting Art Prizes" (PDF). Hunting plc. p. 41. Retrieved 23 January 2015.

External links

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