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

Where do you draw the line between what constitutes art and what doesn't? Do you draw that line at all?

I think it's more important to push that boundary, because in the end, if you're producing within that line per se, if you're thinking "wow this is for sure going to be art, I'm pretty certain that we have an artistic experience going on here," to me in my own personal views that's the greatest likelihood that there isn't any art going on at all. I'm looking for experiences and trying to create them myself, and actually expand that idea, and expand the notion of what I think art potentially is, because I think it is the most important form of communication that we have. It's the primary form of communication there is; there's much in the world that has been done because it was linked with artistic thought or experience. So it's really important to expand the idea of what art can have as it's subject and/or as it's potential. I feel like you need to really be pressing at or beyond those limits, rather than squarely within it. I think with my own work, in the context of whichever film and sculpture or whatever's coming up basically is just pushing beyond my own thinking, and my own previous limitations or whatever what was bracketing my work and thinking beyond it and then working in ways takes the experience out of balance. [Chrome, 1996]