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

Well with your work, which often contains themes of materialism and consumerism, how does that affect you? In terms of your creative process, does it actually make you reconsider your themes when you're actually painting?

Oh absolutely. You can say that the images that were in my last show were first seen through social media, and not as paintings. So the actual paintings that you see in the show were paintings of basically the most popular images seen on social media. I just basically selected the ones that were most seen and most recognized ahead of time and then chose those particular pictures, the ones that had been chosen by many many people and seen in the media, and those images would become paintings. So it was taking my original process which is images out of the media, and became popular after the fact, and then making paintings of those, to having images that were already in the media so it flips over the whole thing. There are really interesting reversals of projection; he work is a projection of media rather than a reflection of it. Much of appropriation art of the 1980's was a kind of exposure of the workings of media through the condition of art, of seeing it as an artwork by re-presenting advertising, and taking different perspective of it. Now we can literally project through those mediums. [Blauvelt, 2013] [Photo via]