Tom Phillips

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Tom Phillips (born 25 May 1937) is an English artist.

He was born in London, where he still works.

He is a painter, printer, and colllagist.

Life

Trevor Thomas Phillips was born in Clapham, London, on May 25, 1937, the younger of two sons. His mother ran a 10-room boarding house and his father speculated in cotton futures. His family named him Tom.

The cotton industry in 1940 collapsed, and the family was forced to sell their house. Phillips' father retired from work in Abergavenny, leaving his wife to run the boarding house in London. Since the war, the family finances increased and they were able to holiday in France and Germany each year. His parents began to buy short leasehold properties as investments, but although this did not result, they later expressed disappointment that their mother did not purchase the freehold of one house, which would later become her son's studio and home.

Phillips attended Bonneville Road Primary School in Clapham from 1942 to 1947. Though he was there, he says he "learned the word artist" and discovered that an artist is someone who doesn't have to throw his paints away and has decided to become one." Despite enjoying school, he was praised for his fascination with drawing and his refusal to conform. When he was only eleven, his mother recalled him buying a platform ticket every Sunday and long train journeys. He went to Henry Thornton Grammar School, Clapham, where he discovered his passion for music, playing violin and bassoon in the orchestra, and performing solo baritone in school concerts and theatre performances. In an open art show on the railings of the Thames Embankment in 1954, he exhibited paintings for the first time. He gained a travel scholarship to France a year ago and spent three months in France. His mother remembers him returning to London with a sack of horse bones from the first World War, but more importantly, he learned how to play. He was born in 1957 as a founder of the Philharmonia Chorus.

At St Catherine's College, Oxford, Phillips read English Literature and Anglo Saxon from 1958 to 1960. He attended life drawing classes at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, participated in drama, and illustrated the Isis magazine. At Aristotle Road School, Brixton, London, he taught Art, Music, and English at the beginning. He took 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 first arrived in 1964, his work was chosen for the Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London, and the AIA Galleries in London held their first one-man exhibition that year. Jill and their daughter Ruth were born in 1964 while attending Camberwell Phillips. Leo, Leo's son, was their second child.

Phillips became a teacher at Ipswich School of Art, where one of his students, Brian Eno, would become a lifelong friend. He soon began teaching Liberal Studies at Walthamstow Polytechnic Institute, where he met pianist John Tilbury and appeared in improvisation concerts at several polytechnics. Four Pieces for Tilbury was his first musical performance.

Phillips appeared at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for the first time in 1966, embarked on A Humument and began collaborating with Brian Eno. Cornelius Cardew founded the Scratch Orchestra in Bath (where he had been a professor at the Bath Academy of Art) and attended the majority of the performances until disillusioned with the institution's politicization. He moved to Wolverhampton, England, in 1968, where he had his second one-man exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. In the following year, he wrote the opera Irma and began the Terminal Grey series of paintings.

His works were widely displayed in one-man shows and collections during the 1970s and collections. He resigned from teaching and embarked on Africa after a period as a visiting tutor at the Art School in Kassel, Germany. He started the 20 Sites n Years photographic project in 1973. Hansjörg Mayer's first significant publication, Works/Texts I, was released in 1975 by him, and his first retrospective exhibition toured Europe. This was also the year he met Marvin and Ruth Sackner, who were to become his patrons, and discovered an archive in Miami that held the majority of his works. The privately printed version of A Humument's last year was published in ten sections since 1971.

Brian Eno produced an album of Irma for Obscure Records directed by Gavin Bryars in 1978 with a cast including Howard Skempton and Phillips himself. Phillips began contributing regular reviews to The Times Literary Supplement (now TLS). He designed a series of tapestries for his old Oxford college at the start of the 1980s, but he returned to portraiture with a portrait of Pella Erskine-Tulloch (the bookbinder who bound Phillips' favorite version of A Humument in three volumes). On Sunday, Erskine-Tulloch would be the subject of a series of weekly sittings that he referred to as "Pella." He had moved out of his family's home at 102 Grove Lane and re-entered his studio at 57 Talfourd Road in Peckham. In the Choumert Café on Choumert Road, a man with a great love of food would dined every Tuesday. His own limited edition of his own translation of Dante's Inferno illustrated with his drawings was released in 1983 and 1984, and he was named a Royal Academician in 1984. The A TV Dante co-directed by Peter Greenaway and Phillips with John Gield and Bob Peck, which was shown on Channel 4 television in 1986. During this period, he also worked with Malcolm Bradbury, Adrian Mitchell, Jake Auerbach, Richard Minsky, and Heather McHugh.

Phillips painted portraits of Monty Python staff and created a glass screen and paintings for The Ivy restaurant in London at the start of the 1990s. Plato's Symposium for the Folio Society (for whom he would illustrate Waiting for Godot in 1999), completed his Curriculum Vitae series of paintings, and saw a new Works and Texts book published. He went to Harvard as Artist in Residence at the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts in 1994, and he wrote Merely Connect, which he had written with Salman Rushdie during a string of portrait sittings. Phillips began to lunch at the Crossroads Café, where he could be seen reading literary magazines through his blue-rimmed spectacles with the shift to a new studio in Bellenden Road and a change of ownership of the Choumert Café.

He curated Africa: The Art of a Continent for the Royal Academy in 1995 and became their Chairman of Exhibitions. Phillips began to move into new fields in the mid-1990s: stage design, The Postcard Century for Thames & Hudson (building on his passion for postcards), quilting, mud drawings, and wire structures. All his old projects continued, and he began to draw Ulysses. When he was assisting in the production of the English National Opera, he also translated the libretto of Otello. When the label went out of print in 2002, Largo Records released Six of Hearts, a compilation of Phillips' songs and other covers, but it went out of print.

Phillips was a figure in the majority of the arts by the 1990s. He became a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, an Honorary Fellow of the London Institute, an Honorary Member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and a Trustee of the British Museum. He commemorated his fiftieth birthday by playing cricket with several of his colleagues at the Kennington Oval cricket grounds. He married writer Fiona Maddocks, Observer's Music Critic, in 1995.

He created lampposts, pavements, gates, and arches for Peckham Renewal Project in 2000. Antony Gormley, whose studio adjoins Phillips' studio in Bellenden Road, Peckham, created bollards for the same cause, as well as the work of both artists adorns the street.

In the 2002 Queen's Birthday Honours List, Phillips was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the Arts.

Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University from 2005-06.

Phillips held a Micro-Retrospective at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2006, among them "Colour Sudoku."

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