Letter Paintings

After Beckett: I Can’t Go On
oil on panel
2017
91.5cm x 77.5cm

After Henry James
oil on canvas
2012
84.5 x 104.8cm

Einstein and Mallarmé Throw Dice
watercolour
2012
h25.5cm x w25.5cm

These letter paintings, produced in the last five years of Tom Phillips’s life are the summation of his career-long preoccupation with making work concerned with language and lettering, what might now be called text based art. 

His first drawing on leaving art school was titled Language Study and in it he saw “the unwitting beginnings of a vain but intriguing quest to find where are and the marks of script and sign, creatures of a single birth, were separated.” *

Stencilled letters appeared in many of his early paintings, including Benches but gradually the stencils gave way to the painted overlaid texts of works such as Here we Exemplify or The Calligrapher Replies which isolate the echoing beauty of letterforms and scripts as things in themselves floated away from meaning.

Later, in the 1980’s while working out how to draw on vellum by scraping back painted marks with a scalpel to make both recognisable and abstracted letters, Phillips evolved the method of creating a carved calligraphy which formed the basis of his series of Curriculum Vitae paintings. 

In the 1990’s Phillips found that making drawings from texts showed him a way to produce screens of words wrought from welded copper wire which were entirely self supporting, the structure made of only the words themselves. 

His final paintings take this further. The geometrically configured texts float in fields of vibrating pointillist colour. The texts, quotations concerned with literary, scientific and philosophical enquiry, are coaxed into form creating finely balanced spatial relationships.

The quote below from Phillips’s 2012 Studio Blog shows his increasing interest in how art and language meet science. 

"Art has long been happily married to uncertainty. Science, however, has only recently (and somewhat reluctantly) become its suitor. It is now almost a hundred years since Einstein said that 'God does not throw dice' (der Alte nicht würfelt were his actual words). I suspect that what he meant was that wherever randomness and indeterminacy seem to crop up we have merely failed as yet to find the certainties that must lurk beneath the aleatoric disguise.

Mallarmé's formula, in his famous poem of 1897 Un Coup de Dés, is a more subtle evocation of what I think of as Quantum Poetics. By somehow squaring the dice throw ad infinitum (Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hazard) he returns to a neat zero.

Translating Mallarmé's opening statement 'A throw of dice will never do away with chance' I made a rearrangement of its words paraphrase Einstein; 'Away with chance. A throw of dice will never do'. Thus in essence (and within a square) they disagree to agree, leaving the equation in a state of suspended resolution."

*Works & Texts, 1992 p94