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.

App for iPhone

To celebrate the appearance of A Humument App on iPhone I shall shortly add a dozen or so newly revised pages. The first to change will be page 1 (which is what one sees on opening the app) in its original version done in 1967 not long after textual intercourse, for me, began. The standard introductory phrase of a would-be epic, the Virgilian/Miltonic I Sing has to remain of course. What most cried out for change was the somewhat tentative surround. Here it is in its new livery as trailer for adaptations to come.

The strangest affect of my possession of an iPad (I do not have an iPhone) is that I have become my own consumer. Each night after midnight when the daily page first announces itself I consult, somewhat furtively (even though alone), the Oracle that I have made. I am often surprised by pages made long ago and almost forgotten, as well as by the sometimes uncanny predictions they offer their maker.

A Humument App

On returning from Princeton the big excitement at Peckham HQ is presiding over the final birth throes of my Humument app for iPad which is now up and running thanks to midwives Lucy and Alice, consultant Jonathan Hills and the surgical expertise of John Bowring.

So, safely delivered it shows, in colours more glowing that my pens and paints could achieve, almost like church windows at times, the whole of A Humument, including very recent pages. And all at full size, together with a device for using the book as an oracle in the manner of the randomised predictions of the I Ching (though on the iPad a little internal jiggery-pokery replaces the never quite available yarrow sticks).

Very soon after starting the book in the sixties I dreamed of its use as an oracle and it has taken forty years for technology to make that possible.

So if you have an iPad you should go straight to A Humument in the app store and have a look. If you do not have an iPad a word to Father Christmas might do the trick. If you only have an iPhone, well stick around: there will be a miniature version early next year.