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

So when did you begin to explore the notions of celebrity and culture through your paintings?
"Rory Davis" The first show that looked at celebrity more specifically was in 2002, in my Birds of Britain show, which was a show that was dedicated and an homage to the photographs of John B. Greene. He captured the youthquake generation, and the images that I chose to paint were all in black and white and they were a kind of a memento mori. The fact is that none of the young women in the pictures are remembered, per se, as being superstars, although they very much were superstars at the time those pictures were taken. So it was kind of a gap between what the projected stardom was and what they ended up being. It was a look at the fleeting nature of fame and how it could be represented. The whites of the eyes and the teeth in the painting were gilded in aluminum, so they had this strange reflection which actually made the painting seem flat and empty compared to the volume with which they were painted. And moving on, there are a number of different shows in Europe and survey shows in Europe bringing us up to the present, where I started making films in 2010. Previous to that, I did a show called Most Wanted in London, which explored the relationship between media, celebrity, and luxury brands, and the need for sponsorship and endorsements in art, in a pretty straightforward way.
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