The Tom Phillips Dante Archive is featured both in the Bodleian Library's 2007 summer exhibition, Italy's Three Crowns: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and the accompanying publication of the same name. The exhibition will be open from 19 June to 31 October in the Exhibition Room, Old Schools Quadrangle, Catte Street, Oxford. Admission is free.

Another Dante exhibition opens in August 2007 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, entitled Dante Rediscovered: Blake to Rodin. Though largely confined to the 18th and 19th centuries it will show two works by TP; a portrait drawing and a copy of the Talfourd Press Dante edition. The exhibition will also include works by Blake, Fuseli, Rossetti and Byron and Shelley manuscripts.

Recent prints by TP appear in an exhibition of work by Royal Academicians at the 108 Gallery in Harrogate 23rd June to 14th July 2007.

This year TP has designed the cover of the Garsington Opera programme and a limited number TP's prints will be available for sale at the box office tent during the Garsington Opera Season from the 9th June to the 9th July 2007

Works by TP will appear in Eye-Music: Klee, Kandinsky and all that Jazz, an exhibition about music in art at Pallant House 30 June - 16 September 2007

TP will be speaking at the British Library on Monday 24th September 2007 on the subject of Wagner and Popular Art. This is the first event in a special season at the British Library accompanying the Ring Cycle at the Royal Opera House.

An exhibition of new works by Tom Phillips will open at Flowers New York in the autumn.

Here is an illicit sneak preview of The Library at Elsinore as it appears in Gallery II of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. The mock bookcase contains real books overpainted in grey with titles borrowed from Hamlet in black. These are titles of actual books by actual authors in order of the apprearance of their words in the play. There must of course be more no doubt being borrowed as I write but these are all that my research has turned up. Most are (rightly I presume) obscure but others are by known writers from Lloyd George to Graham Greene with, most recently, Alan Bennett's Single Spies (Simon Callow suggested, he claims, this brilliant choice of title).

The Library at Elsinore (Fragment), 2006.

Shakespeare on a visit to the castle at Elsinore is to have an audience with the King. He is set to wait in its ample library for the summons into the royal presence. He finds himself alone there except for two rather overdressed courtiers who seem already to have been waiting for some time. He idly scans the shelves and takes down a book whose nicely ambiguous title, A Show of Violence, intrigues him. Its contents, however, seem of little interest. Replacing it he notices that the subsequent books on the shelf all have titles equally suggestive of emotion, escapade and death. So is it also on the shelves below. As if in a dream the titles conjure up, one after another, a sequence of speeches and events in a play.

As he reaches for the last book on the fifth shelf, Casual Slaughter, the door of the library opens. The courtiers look hopefully up but it is Shakespeare that the steward invites to follow him.

After his audience with the King, Shakespeare is returned to the library to await the coachman. He eagerly makes for the same shelves only to find that they contain a dull series of tracts and biblical commentaries...

Some such scenario or dumb show is the conceit behind a long planned installation, The Library at Elsinore, whose bookcase Andy has just finished constructing. I have been loading its shelves with the books I have prepared over the last few months and which have been lying in rows and piles around the studio.

Last year at the Ashmolean Museum I showed a maquette of a single shelf which contained all the titles (of actual books) that derive from Hamlet's speech, To be or not to be.....

Now the whole play is covered and next week as one of the hangers of the Summer Exhibition at the RA I hope to find a nice corner for it.

Periwinkle Diaries I & II will be shown as a pair in this year's RA Summer Show (11th June - 19th August) together with five other new works including the installation The Library at Elsinore and new prints South London Dreaming, The Autumn Arrested and a new Humument print.

South London Dreaming, Silkscreen ed 25, 65cm x 74.5cm, 2007.

In Israel, Epson and silkscreen ed 100, 34cm x 30cm, 2005.

The Autumn Arrested, Epson & Silkscreen, ed 25. 2007, 81cm x 81cm

Next year if eyes and hand allow I'll try again if only to relearn the artist's first lesson, so well and so long ago laid down in Plato's theory of forms. The classic periwinkle flower is an amazing construction. Designed (if one may still use that word without prejudice) like a ship's propellor: it is full of energy yet with only wilting and withering in prospect, full of movement but with nowhere to go.

   
Friday/Diary title, 5" x 5" 2007.

I should explain here that these flower drawings, although I have eagerly chosen to do them, are not really what I am doing. They are, as I think of them, what I am doing before what I am really doing. And what is that? What I am really doing is what I do instead of what I am not doing. And what is that? What I am not doing and really should be doing, and presume myself to be failing to do (either through ignorance of what it is, or lack of courage to embark on it) is what Henry James calls the real, right thing. It is that which should be done, or tried for, before there is an end of doing altogether.

This is not some riff of sophistry but an attempt to verbalise those churnings of daily doubt which I have known all my working life; ever since I entered the garden of forking paths presented to the artist by the twentieth century. Somewhere half formulated has been an idea, itself a guarantee of failure, of making that garden not of forking but rather of converging paths.

Mentioning Henry James reminds me that one of the things I really am doing is drawing (for wire sculpture) the quotation from James that I made a pastel version of last year. 'We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. The rest is the madness of art.' Perhaps as I allow myself to think, albeit briefly, and only from time to time, it might be a real, right thing.

  
Wednesday/Thursday 2007, 5" x 5"

There are three sites where periwinkles grow in Talfourd Road (including those planted by Megan in my own front garden). The most richly coloured variety occurs in the garden of Anne and Trevor Dannatt (Trevor is the other Royal Academician in the street) but theirs have been less profuse this year than last. I pick the day's victim on the way back from getting the newspaper [hardly dawn-gathered then, are they? - Ed] in order not to walk both up and down the road waving a flower like Bunthorne in 'Patience'.

  
Monday/Tuesday 2007, 5" x 5"

In May last year I drew a different Peckham-picked dawn-gathered periwinkle flower each morning for a week, framing the small drawings together as A Periwinkle Diary. When this came back unwanted from a Jerwood Drawing Show (which usually welcomes my work) I viewed its return [according to my vows] as negative endorsement; a call to carry on. This year the first periwinkles appeared in March and now are in full spate, so I must start anew...

  
Periwinkle Diary 2006

[to be continued...]

No sooner than Part 2 of Miami Dice is put up than TP receives a message from his friend in Saskatchewan, Bill Hurrell.

"Another coincidence in our long history. I've only just moved from Indian Head to nearby Wolseley, a pleasant little town famous for its swinging bridge. I'm enjoying the blog but it might be helpful to point out to folk outside Britain that Wolseley and Austin (whose great library in Texas coincidentally collects your books) are both names of defunct British automobiles and that there indeed was a small 7hp car when we were kids marketed as the 'Baby Austin'. I shall, tomorrow I hope, be the first to toast the amazing Sackners with an Austin in Wolseley..."

So I stand on a staircase in front of a window. Behind me buzzards, and the occasional lazy pelican, glide by on the rise of cushioning thermals and glare into our sky-high humanarium. What do they make of the bronzed throng and the walls crowded with pictures? Many of the latter I recognise as mine, one or two almost forgotten, some I would not now know how to do, most made for love alone,
a few to impress
but I digress

I start to tell how I arrived at the cocktail scheme and how I wanted it to be about Mallarmé the founder of concrete poetry and first god of the Sackner Archive and to use his poem Un Coup de Dès whose first lines I have translated (for the spots in Miami Dice)

A throw of dice
will never do
away with chance

which by permutation produces a concrete flourish of ambiguity:-

Away with chance!
---
A throw of dice
will never do!
---
A throw of dice
will never do
away with chance.

Yet Mallarmé did not yield a quaffable clue which was a pity since the disposition of words on the page of his seminal poem was the liberating model for my own texts in a humument. It would also have suited the cocktail to be called 'aleator' (from the latin for 'thrower of dice', pronounced as in 'See you later, aleator'). But it was not to be, so I turned to the next in the French succession, Wilhelm Albert Apollinaris Kostrowitzky, and struck if not gold then liquid amber . It was under this, his real name, that Guillaume Apollinaire was drafted into the army. His comrades in arms found the name Kostrowitzky a bit of a mouthful so called him 'Cointreau-whisky'.

Jeremy King considered this combination mixed in equal parts a novel but viable recipe for a classic cocktail, to which would be added a dash of the poet's third given name, the mineral water Apollinaris.

Thus I had a cocktail but had to end my shaky oration with a stirring toast to the Sackners in a conceptual drink neither titled nor poured.

The evening continued ever more convivially with the arrival of Sara Sackner the filmmaker, and John Pull the eminence grise of my website.

Now the guests depart as they do in American events, like guilty creatures upon a fearful summons. The party's nuclear group finds its floridian way (ie without seeming to touch a sidewalk or encountering the open air) to a cosy corner of a cavernous restaurant, eating again. Then somehow Ruth, Marvin and myself are reteleported to the penthouse.

I seek a smoke and head for the balcony imagining a calm moment of solitude in the balmy night, savouring the view over the city. I open a door and walk into a wall, a solid rush of suicide-assisting air which if I hold my cigarette aloft smokes it for me faster than I could myself. Another round to the Sackners in their war against the weed.

Oh Those Reds... Acrylic on canvas, 1969-1973

Instead I sit in the kitchen with a cup of coffee facing an old picture of mine, the best of the catalogue of colours I made over thirty years ago with intervals determined by coin tossing. It is a special (and infrequent) pleasure to enjoy a picture one made long before hiding as it does within its stripes such mixed memories.

Mall Pavement, 2004, oil on board.

I recently revived this procedure when designing a pavement in Bellenden Road which runs along the fronts of the shops (in appropriate tribute to the ubiquitous barcodes). I echoed this in a little painting (now proudly using a minted coin of my own design, one of only 18,000,000 copies) of a projected mall flooring in black and white marble with a granite border in dollar-green.
But it is time for bed. I make for my alloted room, fearful of its ceiling composed entirely of mirrors. This was installed by the previous tenant, a famous fancy dancer, and has no doubt witnessed many a steamy and athletic pas de deux on the enormous bed below. Certainly it has never looked down on so drab a sight as the lone ageing artist turning the unarousing pages
of the TLS
but I digress
I did indeed find the name of the cocktail some weeks later when reading about Apollinaire in Richardson's splendid life of Picasso: how the poet first met the artist in Austin's Hotel in which seedy establishment I stayed for a month in 1955 on a travel scholarship, reading the works of Henry Miller while remaining unaware as only youth can be that the frequent feet upon the stairs were those of clients visiting prostitutes. It is still there in the rue d'Amsterdam though now considerably smarter and more respectable. The fact that it was also at the premises of a Mr Austin in Peckham that I bought the original copy of A Human Document in 1966 (unaware in this case that I would still be working on the book more than forty years later) clinched the matter. Austin's Furniture Repository has now gone the way of such emporia (replaced by Austin's Buildings, a more profitable property speculation). If a restaurant can be called the Wolseley then a cocktail can surely be called an Austin. One day perhaps I'll have an Austin at the Wolseley. Not my sort of drink really, so perhaps a Baby Austin will do.