The Ivy

The Professionals
acrylic on panel
1990 
collection The Ivy

The Ivy: Glass Screen
1989

Strings
pastel on paper
122 x 78.5 cm
2006
collection of The Club at The Ivy

The Ivy word sculpture

Tom Phillips designed the original menu for The Ivy and also a screen made up of two hundred and twenty five identical pieces of clear glass each individually treated by him, using a variety of resists and etching/engraving procedures. 

His pastel Strings featured on the menu for The Club at The Ivy and he created a word sculpture in wood, playfully reconfigurable to be read in many different ways.

From Works & Texts (1992) page 169 

On the right hand side of The Ivy's main interior door is a wall in which are set ten painted panels, The Professionals. Each represents one of those pillars of modernism who, as well as blazing an artistic trail, had careers in medicine, banking, insurance etc., in many cases for the whole of their lives. 

Each portrait contains a food reference (Eliot's daunting peach, Neruda's tomato etc.) and other enigmas. The castlist of ten consists of Henri Rousseau, Charles Ives, Joseph Conrad, Anton Chekhov, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Franz Kafka and Paul Gauguin.