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Denis PhillipsAbstract #4102010
2010
$10,500
£8,063.55
€9,240.73
CA$14,781.41
A$16,558.44
CHF 8,612.45
MX$201,978.82
NOK 109,647.91
SEK 103,390.16
DKK 68,970.26
About the Item
Abstract #410, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 inches.
Excerpts from DENIS PHILLIPS written by Jane Connell
“I’ve never really known a time in my life,” Denis Phillips muses, “when one way or the other, I was not pursuing art and music.” His parents and grandparents were musicians. His grandmother has a piano and, during frequent visits, he copied illustrations by N.C. Wyeth from books she had. Making drawings and playing musical instruments, nurtured in his youth, are prevailing constant today. Besides maintaining a spacious room for painting, Phillips has dedicated a considerable area of his Salt Lake City studio to an array of electronic musical equipment – a piano and synthesizer, guitars and chimes, a multi-tract tape recorder and more. Here, art and music inform one another in a variety of contexts and media.
Improvisation is at the heart of Phillips’ creativity. Whether he is exploring combinations of sounds and rhythms or compositions of color and form, the range of his artistic expression is defined by the energy of the moment. As an artist, he moves effortlessly from oil and acrylic to watercolor, from sketching and plein air painting to working in the studio from memory, and from intuitive abstractions and realistic rural scenes to abstracted forms of landscape. “I like it all,” Phillips says.
Phillips’ paintings done in an abstract expressionist vein correspond most closely to his process of creating music. While he does not consciously attempt to make his music visual or his painting lyrical, he sees both modes of expression as experimental and open-ended – the impulse of one sound or gesture suggests the next, unhampered by preliminary notations or sketches. “By starting a painting without direction, things happen that you may not anticipate,” says Phillips. “Abstraction allows your mind to wonder around and think things that may or may not be accurate.”
The artist delights in this spontaneous unknown, in the momentum of purely visual rendition. Some of the best abstract works emphasize color relations, while others are more concerned with the matters of shape and line. Some are cool, others are warm in tonality. Dark, brooding compositions contrast with those emblazoned in bright hues. All are boldly executed. Great swaths of acrylic pigment are overlaid in a succession of vigorous, multi-colored hatching, first horizontal, then vertical. Striking diagonals and geometric shapes punctuated with splashes, drips, and linear flourishes, make frequent appearances. In smaller works, such painterly gestures boil just below the surface of the canvas. In large scale, they explore and reverberate as if set loose from the confines of the two-dimensional format.
Denis Phillips was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1938. He was one of a generation of dynamic students who experimented in both realistic and modernist styles at the University of Utah, where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1962. He has remained in Salt Lake City, developing his own talents and encouraging those of others, having taught courses at the Salt Lake Art Center, the University of Utah, and Westminster College. Over three decades, Phillips has exhibited extensively in the region and nationally. His paintings are included in many corporations and private collections.
- Creator:Denis Phillips (1938, American)
- Creation Year:2010
- Dimensions:Height: 60 in (152.4 cm)Width: 60 in (152.4 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Salt Lake City, UT
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU154328082322
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