BIG-SCREEN ILLUSTRATOR

Phil’s work is often said to have a cinematic quality. How does he do it?

“I always feel as if I’m figuring out the story myself as the piece comes together. But I’m also trying to keep that knowledge and pursuit completely compartmentalised, or it will interfere with what might be possible with the image. The real moment of creation is when I’m pushing the collage images against each other. And the surprise is that the images which seem complementary – a burning car, a building in rubble – are the most uninteresting.

The toughest thing for me is trying to keep the image out of the genre, and sometimes the genre is just art. Richter might have been talking about deer, but now a black and white deer painting is about Richter. I want to avoid that as much as possible. Drippy paint reaching to the bottom of the canvas is bad. But that’s painting and painting is bad. Mostly.

I’m still stupidly excited by how simple additions generate an entire universe that’s arbitrary and personal and unknown. A man’s dim face in the foreground, a pale square behind. Some kind of farmer. What’s in the barn?

My own ideas are kind of boring. By using photos that I didn’t take myself the pieces are charged with unpredictable foreign information, and often connected to an entire world out there that’s only accessible through those bits of info. I try to go with the flow of the images without trying to corral them.”