Humument Page 2 Drawing

Tom Phillips CBE R.A. (born 24 May 1937) is an English artist. He was born in London, where he continues to work. He is a painter and collagist, and works in other media as well. His best known work is A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. One day, Phillips went to a bookseller's with the express intention of buying a cheap book to use as the basis of an art project. He randomly purchased a novel called A Human Document by Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock, and began a long project of creating art from its pages. He paints, collages or draws over the pages, leaving some of the text peeking through in serpentine bubble shapes, creating a "found" text with its own story, different from the original. Characters from Mallock's novel appear in the new story, but the protagonist is a new character named "Bill Toge", whose surname can only appear on pages which originally contained words like "together" or "altogether". Toge's story is a meditation on unrequited love and the struggle to create and appreciate art. Several editions of A Humument have been published over the years, with more and more pages being revised each time. The project is ongoing, and future editions are expected. Phillips has used the same technique (always with the Mallock source material) in many of his other works, including the illustration of his own translation of Dante's Inferno, (published in 1985). He is also fond of re-using images from postcards (which he avidly collects) as well as drawing stencil-style lettering, freehand. The melding of visual art with textual content is a hallmark of Phillips's work. He also paints portraits (his portrait of Dame Iris Murdoch is well known) and murals, and creates installation art and sculpture. He is a member of the Royal Academy (since 1989) and, in 2003 designed a Royal Mint commemorative five-pound coin for the 50th anniversary of the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He is an opera fan, and has composed an opera, Irma, using the Humument source material for the libretto. He also wrote the libretto for Heart of Darkness, a chamber opera with music by Tarik O'Regan currently in development with American Opera Projects. Phillips engages in other projects that challenge the viewer's perceptions of art, such as his ongoing project 20 Sites n Years, in which he photographs the same 20 spots in his studio's neighborhood, once a year. As the years go by, the viewer watches the neighborhood gradually change.