John Phillips

Working across various mediums - painting, film, theater and poetry - John Ransom Phillips lives and works in New York but has spent significant periods of time in Europe and Egypt. While continuing his painting and creative writing, he completed his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute and Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Having studied with Richard Diebenkorn, Phillips expands on his teacher’s love of light, particularly the blue light of southern California. With this use of color and love of paint, Phillips engages history, both narrative and psychological. Rather than representing recorded histories, he explores inner lives, dreams, fantasies, and for many, secret wishes and desires.

Phillips’ paintings combine image and text and can be read in the larger legacy of Symbolism. His oil paintings and works on paper have a dream-like quality where forms morph and melt into one another. From his Sleeping Presidents series, beds become wondrous landscapes where dreams become real and where psychological narratives are enacted.