Seventy Fifth Birthday News

Seventy fifth birthday looming up and a small self fest to celebrate. 

The new and updated 5th edition of A Humument will be published by Thames & Hudson on 24^th May.

24^th May (the birthday itself) is also varnishing day at the RA where I’ll be showing tennis balls and 5 new prints in the Summer Exhibition. 

25^th May going local again with a substantial exhibition namely of prints at GX Gallery.

On 26^th a show of new work will open at Flowers East.

Will be doing a reading from A Humument at Review Bookshop on 30^th May. 

For the Flowers show I seem to be in the middle of a group of a dozen or so pastels. Pastels again, yes. Somehow I find myself in tune with paper and charcoal and chalk and pastel and especially with the rubbing out of same, working backwards, erasing away, letting the paper do the white work… more like finding a sculpture inside a messy bit of wood; subtracting, getting rid of, carving back.

How it Ended Up, Pastel, 2012, h61cm x w46cm

Also on birthday number 75, an update to A Humument App for iPad and iPhone comes out on iTunes, and a brand new, redesigned Tom Phillips website will be launched (more about that soon). In the following week I shall be on the road again for the fortieth sampling of 20 Sites n Years.

Blog readers are invited to the private view of my show at GX Gallery, Camberwell on the 25^th May, and the opening at Flowers East on the 26^th May. 

I hope to bump into all three of you at one or the other of these events.

My painting XLIX

5.3.2009

The end of the affair. Finishing a major work, large by my standards and, by anybody's, long drawn out is an experience I can never get used to. Some kind of emptiness displaces the anticipated sense of fulfilment. Perhaps that is why I embrace serial projects that have no end, like 20 Sites n Years which will pass on to another to continue, or A Humument, a book that only death will shut. These are works I cheat of the dissatisfaction that their completion might bring.

With Quantum Poetics I set out to make a masterpiece and in the proper meaning of the work it is exactly that, albeit a flawed one. Back to Beckett and his indelible formula, Try again. Fail better, so apposite to the state of the artist. So this is a hill climbed, steeper perhaps than the one before yet whose top when reached merely reveals a higher hill beyond.

The painter doth protest too much? Maybe so; trying to be frank about the larger sensation I forget the small rewards that even now surprise me when I take down a panel to photograph and notice in some part of it a passage well imagined, finely wrought. The main frustration is having no idea what an object so familiar to me looks like through another's eyes. Once or twice I have caught sight of it in the mirror at the far end of the studio and see that it does have energy, microscopic and macroscopic, and the syncopated rhythm of a dance of signs. And it is a presence, w.a.f.

Most reassuring of all, on an adjacent wall, the panel that originally was its north by north west corner (and having started the picture's motion, was eventually replaced) now sits in the middle of a group of nine panels, hoping to seed a sequel. But that's another story.