Nicholas Phillips - Featured Artist

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. The family then returned to England and he went off to boarding school.

Nichols attended art school in London, the Slade, a place of some history and reputation and though he was a serious student he can't recollect being taught a huge amount of what might be deemed useful there.
He graduated in 1978 and on through the '80s had exhibitions in Tokyo, Zurich, New York as well as London. He was producing water colours, etchings, book objects, and box/objects, in general he seemed inclined to adopt formats that tended increasingly towards the obscure.

On his first trip to New York the man at OK Harris Gallery said that unless he can put the work up on the wall it wasn't going to be easy to get on. Advice he didn't find easy to assimilate. Nevertheless, buried in several public collections you can find some of his early works, at The Yale Centre for British Art, Harvard's Houghton Library, the New York Public Library, and in London the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Science Museum and the Arts Council Collection.

Night Flowering

Dark Star

By 1989 however Nicholas had come to a dead-end as far as fine art went and decided to stop completely. Instead he started a business doing decorative finishes on construction projects, mostly polished plaster and some friezes. This work has took him to many places, back to Tokyo to do a store for John Pawson, to Paris for Anouska Hempel and more recently to the Royal Palace Amman for the Queen of Jordan.

Around the year 2000 he started to paint pictures again in between contracts, even managing a sabbatical year in 2005, Nicholas Phillips returned to painting in 2000 after a ten year break, working exclusively in Winsor & Newton watercolour.  His first solo show for 20 years was held in London at Jonathan Cooper in April 2007.

1451 Local

Zabriskie Point

Nicholas prefers to work from the photographs he takes specifically for each image.  Building up the colour slowly in wash and drybrush the soft gradations and blur achieved give a sense of depth of field, a sense of the fleeting, akin to that which the camera lens can capture and the eye itself cannot.

Working with the white of the paper, the cleanness of the Winsor & Newton colours are ideal for getting the quality of light that will illuminate the final image.

For further information visit http://www.nicholasphillips.co.uk/