Tom Phillips

Born in England 1937, Tom Phillips is an English artist who takes up several preoccupations, this including painter, sculptor, composer, critic, curator and forms of poetry and writing.
In 1966 Phillips set out to make a piece of art from the first second hand book he could buy for three pence; this began 'A Humument' which was the first and to be the longest series of his work including 4 editions. The pieces consist of Victorian books which once forgotten about have been reinvented using means such as collage, cut-up and other techniques. The series is still on going and is said to be only completed when all of the original pages from the books have been reworked. ON these reworked pages, Phillips has picked out certain words and phases and then linked them together by blocking out the other words on the pages, these phrases and sentences make up some of his personal quotations and saying which have been used by other artists in their work.
Using his other talents such as painting portraits, Tom Phillips has used these in his books as the backgrounds to his work which also link in with some of the words that he highlights.
I think that the way he has reinvented and reworked pages from old and forgotten books has worked well, I like the idea of reusing the materials and reinventing the materials for another use than what they were originally purposed for.