Tom Phillips RA, artist
Tom Phillips CBE RA is of the class of 1942 at Bonneville Road Primary School Clapham. He now lives and works in Peckham with occasional attachment to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is perhaps best known for his treated novel A Humument started in 1966 on which he is still working. His website www.tomphillips.co.uk fills in the gaps.
The Arrival of Louis-Philippe 1844
I am here transcribing as laboriously as can be imagined a fragment of a drawing by Turner done at his maximum speed. With its thousands of dots this is in effect a slow motion replay on a large scale analogous to what one sees on TV sport programmes. It highlights Turner’s most personal drawing shorthand whose urgent calligraphic brilliance first excited me when I looked at the original in the Print Room of the Tate’s Clore Gallery. I made pencil sketches on that occasion and was provided with a photograph. I worked up the pencil drawings by means of dots into a small vignette in negative. I made a xeroxed enlargement of this on to good paper and worked over the result with thousands more dots to capture the nuances of Turner’s pen work. Thus, roughly ten hours of my time represent an estimated ten seconds of Turner’s, as might be thought only fitting.
