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Tom Phillips

TOM PHILLIPS (RA, CBE) (1937 - 2022)

Multidisciplinary artist Tom Phillips was born in London, attending St Catherine's College, Oxford in 1957, where he read English and studied drawing at the Ruskin School. Taught by Frank Auerbach in 1961 at Camberwell School of Art, Phillips's first solo exhibition in London was in 1965 at the Artists International Association Gallery, followed by an exhibition with Angela Flowers in 1970. Phillips taught at Bath Academy of Art, Ipswich and Wolverhampton Art College between 1965 and 1972, and in 1969 he won the John Moores Prize,

With a boundaryless practice spanning and often combining writing, painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and conceptual work, Phillips was also known for his music, both classical and, from the late 1960s with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, his own compositions, including as performed by the pianist John Tilbury.

In 1966 Phillips resolved to dedicate himself to making art out of the first secondhand book he could find for threepence on Peckham Rye, which was WH&n

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Tom Phillips 25.5.1937 – 28.11.2022

Tom Phillips's work as an artist was fuelled by several persistent preoccupations, expressed through an even larger number of formats. These include painting (both figurative and abstract), opera (composer, librettist, set designer), concrete poetry and ornamental forms of writing, sculpture and site-specific designs (mosaic, tapestry, wire frame objects). He also took on several para-artistic roles – critic, curator, committee chairman for the Royal Academy, translator – all of which he folded back into his art.

Born in 1937, Phillips attended drawing classes and lectures on Renaissance iconography alongside his studies at Oxford. Back in the South London neighbourhood where he lived and worked nearly all his life, Phillips was taught by Frank Auerbach at Camberwell School of Art.

Phillips's first one-man exhibition in London was in 1965 and he won a John Moores prize four years later. However, in the late 1960s he was possibly better known for his music activities (both classical and with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra) including his

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Tom Phillips was born in South London and studied at St Catherine’s College, Oxford and later at Camberwell College of Arts, where the painter Frank Auerbach was then teaching. Phillips was elected a Royal Academician in 1989. His observations, reading and reflection are as wide as the imagery he derives from them. He is meticulous in his art and his research, analysing and delving into a subject in the most rigorous way, yet he has an abiding concern for chance procedures which enrich and vitalise his work. He uses music and literature to create new forms visually, as well as composing music and film making (he collaborated with Peter Greenaway in a production of Dante’s Inferno). He uses collage techniques, in addition to painting, drawing and printmaking. As an avid collector he has a particular interest in African art. As a portrait painter Phillips requires lengthy sittings; the painting of the portrait of Charles Saumarez-Smith was documented on film by British television Channel 4 in 2004.

www.tomphillips.co.uk
www.royalacademy.org.uk

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