Phillips, Tom

Phillips, Tom (1937– ). British painter, graphic artist, musician, and writer, born in London. He studied English literature at St Catherine's College, Oxford, 1957–60, and painting at Camberwell School of Art, 1961–3, his teachers including Auerbach and Uglow. Phillips's work resists classification and has been much concerned with the fusion of words and images. Simon Wilson (British Art from Holbein to the Present Day, 1979) writes that his ‘primary source material is the modern, photographically based, coloured picture postcard of which he is an obsessional collector … Phillips typically develops some specific human or social theme and then submits the source image to an elaborate painting process so devised that the theme is embodied in a visual scheme of maximum richness and subtlety.’ In 1966 he began using texts from a Victorian novel (A Human Document by W. H. Mallock, 1892) and has produced various suites of prints and other works based on it under the collective title A Humument. A by-product of this work is his opera Irma (first produced 1973, recorded 1980). Another ambitious project is his set of illustrations to Dante's Inferno (1979–83), consisting of etchings, lithographs, and screenprints accompanying his own translation. His writings include the book Music in Art (1997).