Michael Andrew Phillips

Michael Phillips (b. 1993, Litchfield, NH) is a United States Postal Service worker and self-taught artist living in Manchester, New Hampshire. He discovered a liking for visual art in his early twenties and soon became obsessed with the history of art and painting of the past 150 years. This love for art transformed the way he viewed the world around him, and he incorporates the memories of the objects and surfaces he sees every day into his abstract pictures.

“This specific group of works has all been made within the past year. They all take their colors and compositions from objects and events I have experienced over the past year: pictures of plants I take on walks, people in parks, botanical illustration postcards I have collected, and still lifes of my writing desk.

These images serve as jumping-off-points for the abstractions seen in the pictures, which allows me to think less about which colors I ought to use, and stay more “in the moment” making marks on the paper. This process also helps to imbue the works with more meaning than they would otherwise have as purely abstract pictures.

While the source images were almost entirely taken outside, in nature, I always bring the pictures back inside and make the drawings at a desk or in my car and play either music or audiobooks and have flashcards with quotes from books or poems lying around so each work builds up its own kind of unexpected history through these various sources.”

Michael’s work was featured in ‘Within Without’ on view June 10-25, 2023.

Michael Andrew Phillips