Frederick Phillips Large Surrealist Photo Realist Silkscreen Lithograph Print Swan Dreams c.1990

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Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1953, Frederick Phillips studied Fine Art at Burslem College of Art when Arthur Berry was Head … Read more Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1953, Frederick Phillips studied Fine Art at Burslem College of Art when Arthur Berry was Head of the Fine Art (Painting) Department. In 1974 Frederick graduated with a BA Degree in Fine Art. In 1981 he moved to London and began exhibiting his work at galleries there.
In 1990 he was awarded an 'Artist of Exceptional Merit' visa by the USA and moved to Chicago where he lived and worked for almost 20 years. In 1996 he was invited to lecture on 'Dream and Reality in Art' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and in 2000 a book on his life and his art was published in America. He works mainly in painting and silkscreen serigraph works although he has done lithograph work too (some on the same press Toulouse Lautrec used)
It would be a mistake, however, to view Phillip's paintings as examples of photographic realism. Actually, Phillips is to contemporary art what Kafka is to symbolic fiction. The streets and scenes he conjures up invariably emanate a mysterious, Surrealist Kafkaesque sense of exclusion and alienation. Although Frederick continues to exhibit in select American galleries, in 2007 he returned to his hometown where he established a new studio and has since exhibited his artwork at exhibitions held in Manchester, Birmingham and Staffordshire. He also spent 2 years as a part-time Tutor in Life Drawing at Staffordshire University as well as participating in the judging of the UNESCO-sponsored International Children's Exhibition of Fine Art in Lidice in the Czech Republic where he joined an international panel of judges. In April 2016, the artist was one of the first to move his studio into the new ACAVA Artists' Studios at the former Spode Works pottery factory in Stoke where he continues to paint and plan future exhibitions.
Dedicated to the craft and tradition of oil-painting, Frederick Phillips is a painter for today who uses the techniques of the past to create the masterpieces of the future. His atmospheric paintings are like half-remembered dream images, glimpsed briefly as we awaken.
Whilst at art school, Frederick discovered the Belgian Surrealist, René Magritte, whose form of Surrealism was based on the ideas of "concealment" - one thing hiding another - and "hidden affinities" - new combinations of things with previously unrevealed connections.
This was Frederick’s starting point for a series of early paintings that explored similar themes to Magritte, but also combined an exploration of the art that had inspired the Surrealists, including the artists and writers of the late 19th Century movement referred to as European Symbolism. Through their art and literature, the Symbolists explored the world of dreams, fantasy and the imagination and had close connections to the artists of 19th Century Romanticism, like J.W.Turner, who emphasized "feeling" over "thinking" and sought to evoke an emotional response to their art by seeking the sublime in the natural world and expressing this through their paintings.
​These influences, along with others like the American artist Edward Hopper, whose paintings suggest an atmosphere that some may call ‘surreal’, influenced - and continue to influence - Frederick’s art. But through the many years of his career his paintings have moved away from the earlier, more overtly Surreal images, to his own highly personal and unique vision of the world.
Always inspired by the world that he sees around him, Frederick does not paint exactly what he has seen, but rather, the memory of what he has seen and always with an emphasis on atmosphere, mystery and dream. Photorealism is a movement which began in the late 1960's, the true subject of a photorealist work is the way we unconsciously interpret photographs and paintings in order to create a mental image of the object represented. The leading members of the Photorealist movement are Richard Estes and Chuck Close. John Kacere, Richard Estes and Don Eddy are all practitioners of the art form.
Exhibitions of the artist's work have been held in London, Chicago, Boston, New York, Puerto Rico and Hong Kong and his work is in private and corporate collections throughout the world. See less