“A sense of mystery and remoteness: the lands being scaped here are strictly interior.”
Phillips’ paintings stimulate in us an almost atavistic grasp of what they do. If he has no interest in paraphrasing or echoing the landscape paintings of the past, he is pre-occupied with evoking landscape itself, it’s conceptual essence, it’s personal associations, and even the sensation of landscape that must reside in the most primitive corners of our brains. This would seem a formidable goal, very likely un-achievable save with a few entirely sympathetic, even empathetic viewers (as, for instance, other landscape painters). But Phillips’s audience is broader than that. As well, his own skills and imagination prompt him to generate paintings so technically accomplished, so adroit in their handling of materials, that they insist on our understanding - sensing - them as ”real” on some level. They do more than simply present Phillips’s virtuosity; they act upon us by inferring qualities of landscape with a minimum of aestheticizing mediation (and thus despite his virtuosity). These paintings may be invented, but they impact us with the intensity of a vivid recollection.