J Phillips Artist

[Carlito Roby]

Asan originator of Pop art, Phillips trained at the Royal College of Art with his contemporaries David Hockney, Allen Jones, R.B. Kitaj and others figures in British Pop Art. When he was awarded a Harkness Fellowship he moved to New York, where he exhibited alongside American counterparts Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist. Phillips later returned to Europe, where he now resides and continues to paint and exhibit.

Phillips was born in 1939 in Birmingham, England. From 1953 to 1955, he studied at Moseley Road Secondary School of Art in Birmingham and from 1955 to 1959 at the Birmingham School of Art. In 1959, he visited Paris and started to exhibit at the RBA Galleries in London.

Between 1959 and 1962, Phillips studied at the Royal College of Art where he saw reproductions of work by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He was particularly aligned to American culture and reflected its commercial iconography and aggressive advertising style in his dynamic montage paintings. In 1962 he was one of the subjects of a BBC TV Monitor programme Pop Goes the Easel directed by Ken Russell, along with Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Derek Boshier.[1]

From 1962 to 1963, he taught at the Coventry College of Art and the Birmingham College of Art. In 1963, he was represented at the Paris Biennale, and in 1964 his work was included in the Pop Art exhibition shown at the Hague, Vienna and Berlin.

In 1964, Phillips was awarded the Harkness Fellowship, which brought him to New York where he lived from 1964 until 1966 and while there travelled throughout the United States with his close friend, Allen Jones.

In 1965, he had his first one-man exhibition at the Kornblee Gallery, New York. A year later, Phillips returned to Europe, and from 1968 to 1969, he was guest teacher at the Hochschule fr bildende Knste Hamburg.

In 1970, Peter Phillips married Claude Marion Xylander and they made frequent trips throughout Africa, the Far East, and the United States. Throughout the decade of the seventies, the Phillips' resided in Zurich, Switzerland.

In 1981, Phillips' travels took him to Australia. In 1982-83 he had a retrospective exhibition shown at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool; the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford; the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne; the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh; Southampton Art Gallery and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

The decade of the nineties brought Phillips' work to Canada and the United States, for exhibitions in Montreal, Boston, Houston, and New York. He was a featured artist at the Fundacio Miro and Casal Solleric in Majorca in 1996. In 1998, he was exhibited in London at the "Freedom of Choices" exhibition. At the same time, Phillips built and expanded his property in Majorca to his own design, which has been featured in numerous architecture, gardening, and home magazines.

Claude-Marion Phillips died from cancer on 30 January 2003. In 2004, Phillips staged an exhibition dedicated to his wife, Claude, at Whitford Fine Art (London) and was featured at the "Pop Art UK" group exhibition at Galleriea Civica di Modena, Italy.

And yes, I did meet De Kooning and Matta, but mostly the painters who came through the house were European: Helion, Craxton, Ghika, Paolozzi, Cloclo Peploe, to name a few, some of whom became important to me for their encouragement and example.

SP: Possibly my grey-leaning, restrained palette might have something to do with Coldstream? Or with the English weather. In fact, at the time I was at the Slade, I was still much more influenced by American 20th century painting and Picasso than by Coldstream. Colour, surface and shapes attracted me more than the palette and soft contours of his paintings.

After a couple of years, I returned to London. In my early thirties, John Craxton got me my first show there, in the gallery that represented him. After that, I moved to Montreal, raised our son and painted for years in isolation, and now here I am, in NYC.

My interest in Augusto Torres, a more obscure crush, was in how he simplified, how he kept the geometry and structure in the composition and gave shadows importance. Lots of art and artists have influenced me. Even the Acropolis. Recently, I did a stint at the Albers Foundation, and during the following months, found a lot of rectangles appearing in my canvases.

LG: Many of your paintings, especially your still life, seem less to do with describing actual things and more about the mystery and poetics in the relationship between those things. How do you go about setting up a still life and deciding what to paint?

SP: The important thing for me, whatever the source of the colour, be it observed or invented, it should work in the painting as a whole. I might drop the real colour of the object in favour of something I want instead; so, for example, a cloth that might be blue ends up being something quite else in the painting.

I really enjoyed your Paintings, and what you had to say, Susanna. Not sure quite why we have not crossed paths yet. We have things in common. I grew up in The UK and went to art school there in the 70s and 80s., been here for 20 odd years. I hope we can connect at some point.

Best

Andrew Wykes

Andrewwykes.com

Susannah Phillips was raised in London and attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Her paintings have been in many solo and group exhibitions in London, New York and Provincetown, MA, and are included in numerous private collections. In 2014 and 2017, she was awarded the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency. The artist lives and ...

Lois Dodd has been painting her everyday surroundings for sixty years. Her current exhibition, from February 26 through April 4, 2015 at the Alexandre Gallery in NYC shows twenty-four recent small-scaled paintings that depict familiar motifs such as gardens, houses, interiors and views from windows. Dodd, now eighty-seven, is an iconic figure of ...

by Larry GroffI am honored that Ann Gale agreed to this telephone interview and thank her greatly for being so generous with her time and attention with sharing thoughts about her art and process.Ann Gale is a leading American figurative painter living in Seattle. Her portraits were shown alongside other leading painters of the figure ...

September 11, 2001, hit Phillips very hard emotionally. Out of his distress came the painting A Prayer for My Brother. Fine art prints of this piece have been placed in many fire departments across the country, with a portion of the proceeds going to help families of fallen firefighters.

He is regularly invited to participate in the annual Masters of the American West Exhibition and Sale at the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, an invitational for the top artists in the US. Bill is currently working on a large project documenting the Los Angeles Fire Department which will be placed in their museum. In October, 2013, the artist was inducted into the Oregon Aviation Hall of Honor, along with Doolittle Raider co-pilot Robert Emmens.

Joan Mitchell for her fearlessness both in her paintings and holding her own in the male-dominated New York Abstract Expressionist era of the 1950s. When I see a Joan Mitchell original, I experience her undeniable strength. I feel her paintings were made for her and from her, never for a gallery or person outside of herself. She held true to expressing what was coursing through her body.

Cecily Brown for her ability to inspire abstract painters to work life into paintings. She often paints the human figure, yet she abstracts them in a way that takes the viewer on a visual hunt inside her paintings. Once inside, you question the mysterious space between the real and the abstract and see glimpses of how her mind works.

Willem de Kooning for the masterful way he deconstructs the surface of the canvas with his bold, expressive marks that gush with color and texture.

In your artist statement, you explain that you began painting to help you work through a dark time in your life. In this uncertain time, do you have any advice for others about how creative activities can be therapeutic?

Dark vs light - these are equal energies yet how we use them can change the direction of our lives.

Our human reaction to darkness is to resist it and push it away. My advice is to observe the darkness and purposely channel that energy into your creative work. History has proven that powerful and beautiful art has been created from frightening events. As artists, we have the power to allow despair to come through us, and in doing so, create art and transform that darkness into light.

To be an artist is to engage in the lifelong pursuit of learning. But how do we start that journey? Where do we begin? As a lifelong teacher, these are the questions that I can help you answer. Join me for Mentorship Supportive Session and unlock you creative potential. Click below to learn more.

Recycling and reducing waste is important to her, and so is imbuing her work with fragments of the past that would otherwise be lost forever. Yvette has no formal training in embroidery so she focuses on using a limited number of basic stitches well, and combines these with carefully chosen colours, patterns and textures sourced from her vast vintage fabric stash in the attic.

I make the art I do because I like it, rather than worrying about whether other people will do so too. Do what you enjoy and follow your obsessions, then I think that passion will come across in your work.

My work ranges from small, fairly straightforward hand embroideries on vintage fabric, to more complex pictures with a mixture of detailed hand embroidery and appliqu, to very large textile collages, which can be over one metre (3ft).

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