N I C H O L A S P H I L L I P S
Nicholas Phillips was born in Penang, Malaya. His father was a rubber planter and his first six years were spent on a plantation in the northern state of Kedah before the family returned to England.
He attended the Slade School, London and graduated in 1978.
During the 1980’s had exhibitions in Tokyo, Zurich, New York and London, producing watercolours, etchings, book objects, box/objects.
Public collections include The Yale Centre for British Art, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the New York Public Library, and in London the Victoria & Albert Museum.
N I C H O L A S P H I L L I P S
Extract from “Making the Paintings”
How do you go about making a painting?
Having conceived an idea for a picture I will go about setting up a shoot, mindful of casting, location, props, lighting / time of day. I’ll take several rolls using a film camera.
The photographs come back from the lab normal postcard size.The selected image is scanned and blown up to the final size. I trace and transfer an outline guide then revert to the original size photo as my ‘model’. I then draw everything with water soluble colour pencil, thereafter switching to brush and watercolour to build up the painting.
Photography therefore plays a major part in this process.
I think the main reason to choose the camera as my viewfinder on the world is that it has an entirely objective way of recording reality. In several other aspects too the camera can capture what the eye cannot. Composition (with the crop of the viewfinder); distance (focal planes with apperture settings); time (the speed of the shutter can capture a split second).
On a more practical level, these paintings take a long time to do (well over a year for ‘Zabriskie Point’), - it helps that your life model can keep still for that length of time.
You are simply copying a photograph?
I do stick as closely as possible to the photograph because it embodies the objective reality I want to show. It stands for itself. There is no need for the artist to intrude or interpret, much less to be seen to have been at work with signature brushwork whatever.
I prefer that there is as little evidence of how the painting has arrived on the paper as possible - it appears of itself.
Ars est celare artem?
Yes, art is to conceal art.
Why not just leave it as a photograph?
The photos I take are actually rather poor quality, as soon as they are enlarged at all they get progressively fuzzier - it’s like looking at something without your specs on. Part of the process of the painting is to adjust the blurr to give the right amount of definition. Besides there can be something quite miraculous about a painting, photographs I think have quite different qualities.
Works by this artist
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