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

Is the hyperrealism, sensuality, or provocation inspired more by the initial response you have to the photograph or is it a thought out process?

The images are just from magazines, or in some cases, later on, they were from film, so they - in and of themselves - have no particular sensual quality. It's really just a starting point, so in the sources that are chosen and edited, which is a really important part of my work, I'm looking for a potential communicative quality that can set up an experience whereby the subjective quality of the picture has an effect on one's own subjectivity that they bring to the picture. That relationship can manipulated in a number of different ways, and that has to do with the physical presence, and the image presence. Using painting as a method, you can kind of really stack the odds in your favor, depending on how you approach it, depending on how you use the medium to create representations. So my thinking is the images that I choose are meant to bond with that methodology very acutely so it creates a heightened experience that can't be experienced any other way, like in cinema or photography or anything else. Painting can kind of carry the day. The images have to have qualities that I'm projecting in paintings, and the post production on those images of late have a lot to do with amplifying even further. Not just being satisfied with the found image, or image that has been pulled from a series of moving images, but then taking it from that point and heightening it from post-production and then creating the condition of which the painting experience can then take over. It's really settling those conditions and making them as powerful as possible, and that's what I do with my artwork. [Endless, 2012]