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

Do you think it's harder to have a truly original idea with so much information out there?

I think one of the things...it brings me back to a show that I was asked to be in where it was a show to use a shell or vessel or idea that I was supposed to work with and make something new or create something. What I did was I basically took the PR image from that whole project and very carefully painted that PR image itself. When the organizers of the exhibition saw the painting, they said you didn't do anything new, and I just said "well, I never do anything new (laughs)." I was looking at the nature of making that media, of creating media, of public relations, that was the subject of my work, so I think when we start talking about original ideas, there's a conventional idea about it that has to be immediately thrown out the window. And then we have to think about how ideas actually affect our thinking, and that the idea of originality is not one that's of paramount importance. It's more of how you're drawing connections between thoughts and actions, and what you can possibly do with those. Sasha, 2012