H.W.K. Collam collage

The Dancer
Boys Own Paper (annuals)
collage
1987

Portrait
Boys Own Paper (annuals)
collage
1987

Commentary adapted from Tom Phillips's own words in Works & Texts 1992, p.121

 I first came across in late nineteenth century Boy's Own Annuals, which my brother and I collected (and somewhat guiltily kept back) as wartime paper salvage. These feasts of dramatic engravings on crisp paper are my favourite mine of shape and shading. In using such engravings as a source I benefit from the dead and their cheap labour (so little rewarded in its own day). It could also be that I am honouring their long, lamplit hours by reviving, for a second life, their skilled hatching and cross-hatching.

These collages come from a larger group made to illustrate a proposed edition of H.W.K. Collam's novel Unhaunted Comma.