The first important painting I ever bought was by an artist, previously unknown to me, Tom Phillips. It was hung by a Bond Street dealer, in a mixed show chosen by a critic. Consider Our Haven contained nine separate images of Burnham-on-Sea, set in painted borders. The images were taken from picture postcards of Burnham, small sections of which had been enlarged and most lovingly painted. The title and other information were stencilled in a trademark style which only enhanced the nostalgic charm of the concept.
Tom Phillips, Consider Our Haven, 1968
In 1969, it cost me £185, after some shy telephone bargaining, and I apologised to my then wife for this great extravagance. I excused myself by saying that, if you took the nine pictures-within the picture into account, they were cheap at £20 a throw, but fretted that we would never hear of Phillips again. How wrong can I be? That was rapidly revealed. Not long afterwards, I visited another gallery and met a striking blonde who asked me whether I collected. I owned up, and said my most recent buy was by one Tom Phillips.
‘Oh’, said Angela Flowers (for it was she), ‘I’ve got his first one-man show upstairs’, and led me up to her small own gallery (her first, too), which was filled with marvellous paintings by Phillips - every one of them sold. All I could salvage was a technically tricky but beautiful print of Cézanne with a punning title. Since then, Phillips has been much heard of as a great and prolific polymath, fluent as scholar, collector, musician, and artist in a dazzling array of media, ranging from tapestries via canvasses to small, brilliant books, called Humuments, which must be seen to be explained.
Phillips most also surely be Britain’s (and maybe the world’s) most accomplished doodler. Witness his book, Merry Meetings, which follows him ‘from boardroom to boardroom as he draws his way through more than a hundred committees, meetings and gatherings of trustees (he is chairman of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, among other plum posts). ‘Armed only with a few coloured pens, he transforms dry agendas or pages of statistics into erotic compositions, visionary worlds and studies in the art of ornament’.
These are not just doodles, Phillips asserts, but ‘an essential part of his programme of work. They also serve as an aid to concentration on the verbal train of committee business, and a powerful antidote to dozing off’. Looking at pages almost totally filled with elaborate designs, you wonder how Phillips can possibly follow what’s going on and draw at the same time. It calls to mind the Steve Martin comedy, The Man with Two Brains.
This most handsome piece of bookbinding (on which Phillips is also expert) can be bought for £80, signed, by the artist, from D3 Editions, Third Floor, 5 Market St, Nottingham NG1 6HY email: d3editiona[@]btinternet.com (remove square brackets). The edition is limited to 500 copies.
By the way, that £185 purchase, if it came on the market today, would probably cost you £30,000. Not bad, even after 36 years - especially for someone who we were never to hear from again.
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