I didn’t go to the University of Virginia to become an artist, I thought I’d already decided against that. I was an Anthropology/English Lit double major just taking some art electives with no ambitions.
For someone who would have such an influence on my journey, Philip was rather inconspicuous and unassuming. In my first life drawing class, he would set up the poses, get us going and then disappear into his small office to look at some art books before returning to give concise comments and corrections. But I remember being astounded at how I started to see forms and space and sensed the awakening power in my hands. Hearing him talk about our beginners drawings was when I started to learn the language of drawing, of weights and measures and light. I was hooked.
I had many good teachers in that small Studio Art department but Philip became a mentor for me and it was my privilege to be his teaching assistant for Advanced Painting during my extra year as an Aunspaugh Fellow. It was always about what was to be found in the paintings and one word that stuck with me is ‘rigor.’ And he gave me little pushes. I remember him telling me a few days before the end of my third year that his old teacher Bernard Chaet was teaching with John Walker at the Vermont Studio Center up in Johnson, Vermont that month and that I should try to go. I quickly got my application together, journeyed up there and came back with the realization that I had a lot to learn. It turned out to be the same with the New York Studio School, which he recommended me for two years later. From the first drawing marathons and late night critiques, it was intense but I had found my tribe and it was the immersion in painting that I needed. It was also what unexpectedly led me to Germany.
One of the things I learned from Philip is the magic that can be found in the everyday, the afternoon light streaming across a polished wood floor, the turn of an elbow, two edges of color gently jutting up against each other on a blank wall. These are the things the observational painter learns to seek and discover, to distill and translate into paint to present to others so that they, too, can see these small wonders all around them that they may have failed to notice. That is the beauty of painting in its quintessence.
And Philip takes his time to find a way to arrange these moments into a harmonious composition that seems natural, almost casual, and yet is airtight. They are beautiful images about tones and light but also about the human presence, unspoken interactions, experienced states of being. He is a Vermeer among us.
Philip’s paintings usually exude a feeling of calm, with little drama, simple moments. Much of my interest has been in depicting movement, and yet there is still often a stillness of the captured moment. I also learned from him how streaming light can create space, late afternoon shadows scrapping across pavement. My interest is not just in the figure but in the figure’s existence in a space and his work kindled this preoccupation in me from the beginning.
What I admired in him as a fledgling painter back then was his magnificent realism, the way that everything just fit perfectly. There is a lot of consideration and work behind that, and sometimes you just have to scrape back and start over. Over 30 years on, his paintings are still unmistakably his and yet, now I admire their openness to accidents, their efficient abstraction in the same everyday lived-in space. But everything still just fits perfectly.
Benjy Barnhart
Munich, December 2024