Interview: Artist Richard Phillips On Painting Celebrities, NYC's Art World & His Distinctly Evocative Paintings

Interview: Artist Richard Phillips On Painting Celebrities, NYC's Art World, And His Distinctly Evocative Paintings

How do you choose a subject? Is there a reason you're drawn to these figures, or does it just fall into your lap?

I would say it's more of the latter than the former. It really had a lot to with serendipity in each case. With Lindsay [Lohan] it happened to be from a painting that I made before I had met her. A friend of hers had shown the painting to her on his iPhone, and she responded to it really positively. He said "wow, I think you guys should work together" and just from that type of spark of the moment, we were put in contact. Likewise with Adriana [Lima], Visionaire came to me with an idea for a project focusing on Brazil, and they said "we have Adrianna, would you be interested in working with her?" And just at that moment I thought about what it would be and I put together the concept for that shoot, which then resulted in the painting. Sasha [Grey] was the same way. So it's less being like "I'm choosing this," but when you look at how each of these collaboratives worked together in the scope of that particular show, I think it worked well. At this point in your career do you have more choice with who you paint or do you still go about it the same way? I would say it's a little bit of both, not so much choice directly. Eventually it does become that, but it's not so cut-and-dry. There have been people who looked like we were going to work together and then it just didn't work out, and if it had worked out it would have been as major as anything else. It's just like anything else, like in film the scheduling doesn't work out, or somebody changes their mind, so it has a bit of that in it. Whereas before I didn't do that, I just selected imagery, and it was however that would turn out. Even then it would be like trolling through specific kind of images, and then you would be fortunate to find one that kind of had linkages, you would put them aside and you think maybe they would work together later or the fact that they weren't working together would be interesting. And you proceed from there. So it's kind of been a culmination of both things. [Adriana, 2012]