Online Encyclopedia
Tom Phillips
Tom Phillips (born 1937) is a British artist. He was born in London, where he continues to work. He is a painter and collagist, and works in other media as well.
His most famous work is A Humument, which is usually described as a "treated Victorian novel". 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 Mallock, and began a long project of creating art from its pages. He paints, collages or draws 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 which originally contained words like "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 and more pages being revised each time. The project is ongoing, and future editions are expected.
Phillips has used the same technique (always with the Mallock source material) in many of his other works, including the illustration of his own translation of Dante's Inferno, (published in 1985). He is also fond of re-using images from postcards (which he avidly collects) as well as drawing stencil-style lettering, freehand. The melding of visual art with textual content is a hallmark of Phillips's work, and he is interested in testing and exploring this relationship.
He also paints portraits (his portrait of Dame Iris Murdoch is well known) and murals, and creates installation art and sculpture. He is a member of the Royal Academy (since 1989) and, in 2003, designed a Royal Mint commemorative five-pound coin for the 50th anniversary of the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He is an opera fan, and has composed an opera, Irma, using the Humument source material for the libretto.
Phillips engages in other projects that challenge the viewer's perceptions of art; for instance, his ongoing project 20 Sites n Years, in which he photographs the same 20 spots in his studio's neighborhood, once a year. As the years go by, the viewer watches the neighborhood gradually change. Similarly, Phillips has done a series of paintings called Terminal Greys, consisting of simplistic 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 merely in the accidental "grey rainbow" appearance of the result.
He collaborated with film director Peter Greenaway on A TV Dante, a television miniseries adaptation of the first few cantos of the Inferno.
Phillips has provided cover art for music albums, including Another Green World by Brian Eno and Starless and Bible Black by King Crimson.
He has also produced books about art, including Music In Art and a study of African art.
Selected bibliography
- A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1970, revised editions 1980, 1987, 1997)
- Dante's Inferno (illustrated translation, 1985)
- Works and Texts (1992)
- Africa: the Art of a Continent (1995)
- Aspects of Art: a Painter's Alphabet (1997)
- Music In Art (1997)
- The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages (2000)
- We Are the People: Postcards from the Collection of Tom Phillips (2004)