Interview: Artist Richard Phillips On Painting Celebrities, NYC's Art World, And His Distinctly Evocative Paintings
Tell me more about your recent surfboard project.
I was asked to do a surfboard for the San Diego Autism Foundation in conjunction with Tommy Hilfiger, and it just came out so successfully. The relationship with Tommy Hilfiger was really exciting, and it was with Art Production Fund, who I've done a lot of collaborations with, you know Gossip Girl and things like that. That kind of sparked an interest in potentially creating my own surfboard, so I looked into it further, and worked with Danny Fuller's shaper Michael Baron out in San Diego. We discussed the possibility of creating these surfboard sculptures, which would be highly functional but at the same time would invest in the imagery and technique to make them as beautiful as possible. I created kind of a nude which draws upon images of some of my past works of nudes, and we recomposed them, and did a lot of post production on them, amplifying the color and creating gradient color changes and really working on the composition. What resulted was four boards, two which are kind of a pair of 9 foot 8 guns, which is a term for boards that are used in a very big surf, and then 2 shorter boards, one is a 5 foot 9 quad and the other is a 5 foot 8 tri-fin thruster board. So the range of boards reflect the different disciplines within surf saying, but the extremity of the 9 foot 8 boards are kind of boards that very few people on this earth actually do paddle out on, they lead you in to situations that are life and death.Would like to continue to explore new mediums, like you have with film and sculpture?Absolutely. In each case I had no intention, to be completely honest with you. I didn't think that I would be doing either; I haven't made a sculpture in 22 years, and I had never made a film. But in the same way that I approach my paintings, as I talked about earlier on, there's a methodology to them. From the primer all the way up to how they get painted. I've looked at each of the disciplines in the same way, in terms of breaking down what the constituent parts of film-making are, and the same thing with sculpture, and building into that language, and approaching a new plan. I wouldn't say anything is off the table, it's just how it comes into the practice that I think is completely open. You never know whats around the corner.
I was asked to do a surfboard for the San Diego Autism Foundation in conjunction with Tommy Hilfiger, and it just came out so successfully. The relationship with Tommy Hilfiger was really exciting, and it was with Art Production Fund, who I've done a lot of collaborations with, you know Gossip Girl and things like that. That kind of sparked an interest in potentially creating my own surfboard, so I looked into it further, and worked with Danny Fuller's shaper Michael Baron out in San Diego. We discussed the possibility of creating these surfboard sculptures, which would be highly functional but at the same time would invest in the imagery and technique to make them as beautiful as possible. I created kind of a nude which draws upon images of some of my past works of nudes, and we recomposed them, and did a lot of post production on them, amplifying the color and creating gradient color changes and really working on the composition. What resulted was four boards, two which are kind of a pair of 9 foot 8 guns, which is a term for boards that are used in a very big surf, and then 2 shorter boards, one is a 5 foot 9 quad and the other is a 5 foot 8 tri-fin thruster board. So the range of boards reflect the different disciplines within surf saying, but the extremity of the 9 foot 8 boards are kind of boards that very few people on this earth actually do paddle out on, they lead you in to situations that are life and death.
Would like to continue to explore new mediums, like you have with film and sculpture?
Absolutely. In each case I had no intention, to be completely honest with you. I didn't think that I would be doing either; I haven't made a sculpture in 22 years, and I had never made a film. But in the same way that I approach my paintings, as I talked about earlier on, there's a methodology to them. From the primer all the way up to how they get painted. I've looked at each of the disciplines in the same way, in terms of breaking down what the constituent parts of film-making are, and the same thing with sculpture, and building into that language, and approaching a new plan. I wouldn't say anything is off the table, it's just how it comes into the practice that I think is completely open. You never know whats around the corner.
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