Tom Phillips

Trevor Thomas Phillips (25 May 1937 – 28 November 2022) was an English visual artist. He worked as a painter, printmaker and collagist.

Life and career Trevor Thomas Phillips was born on 25 May 1937 in Clapham, London to David and Margaret Phillips (née Arnold). He was the younger of two sons.

In 1940, the cotton market collapsed and the family had to sell their home. Phillips' father went to work in Abergavenny, Wales, leaving his wife to run the boarding-house in London. Peter Greenaway and Phillips co-directed A TV Dante with John Gielgud and Bob Peck, which was broadcast on Channel 4 television in 1986. During this time he also collaborated with Malcolm Bradbury, Adrian Mitchell, Jake Auerbach, Richard Minsky and Heather McHugh. for the Royal Academy and became their Chairman of Exhibitions. Phillips began to move into new areas 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 illustrating Ulysses. He also translated the libretto of Otello while he was designing the English National Opera production. In 1998 Largo Records released Six of Hearts, a CD of Phillips' songs and other music written since 1992 but this went out of print when the label failed in 2002. In 2006 Phillips exhibited six works in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, among them "Colour Sudoku", and held a Micro-Retrospective (9 February–23 April 2006) at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.

Works Phillips' best known work is A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel originally by W.H. Mallock. 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 Hurrell Mallock, and began a long project of creating art from its pages. He painted, collaged or drew 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 that originally contained words such as "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 pages being revised each time. The sixth and final edition was published in 2016. Phillips was 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 was an opera fan, and composed an opera, Irma, using the Humument source material for the libretto. He also wrote the libretto for Heart of Darkness, a chamber opera with music by Tarik O'Regan currently in development with American Opera Projects.

Phillips engaged in other projects that challenge the viewer's perceptions of art, such as his project 20 Sites n Years, in which he photographed the same 20 spots in his studio's neighborhood, once a year. As the years go by, the viewer watches the neighbourhood gradually change. Similarly, Phillips made a series of paintings called Terminal Greys, consisting of simple 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 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 eight cantos of the Inferno.

Phillips provided cover art for music albums including Starless and Bible Black by King Crimson (1974), Another Green World by Brian Eno (1975), and one of the 16 portraits that form Peter Blake's design for Face Dances by The Who (1981). The cover art by Phillips for Dark Star's Twenty Twenty Sound (1999) used the same technique as The Humument, but with the album's lyrics as the source material.

Phillips also produced books about art, including Music in Art and Africa: The Art of a Continent.

Selected bibliography Exhibition catalogues Tom Phillips: New and Recent Work [catalogue of the exhibition held at Flowers East 26 November – 24 December 2004], London. We are the People: Postcards from the Collection of Tom Phillips [catalogue of the exhibition held at The Nation Portrait Gallery 2 March- 20 June 2004], London. Fifty Years of Tom Phillips [catalogue of the exhibition held at Flowers 12 March – 4 April 1987], London.

Monographs Paschal, H., & T. Phillips (1992),Tom Phillips: Works and Texts. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. Phillips, T., & N. Rosenthal (2005), Merry Meetings: Drawings and Texts by Toms Phillips. D3 Editions Publishers. Phillips, T. (2012), A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. London: Thames and Hudson Ltd.