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I have always felt a calling [in a religious sense] to make art.
Art is a reason for being alive
I was born on the kitchen table of the house I still live in on June 17 1931.
I had a comfortable stable childhood, in a balanced well adjusted family of three. There was little conflict in the house.
I was very much a loner and read a great deal mostly science fiction since my thirteenth year when I met a copy of Planet Stories it was love at first read and the love has lasted until today.
I did some drawing earlier but for Christmas 1956 grandmother gave me some money and I bought paints, borowed a book from the library called Get IN There and Paint and I made made my first oil painting in January 1957.
Later in the spring I heard of the Doon School of Arts near Kitchener and took my two weeks of holiday there. It was the most satisfying experience I ever had. My teacher was Jack Bechtel who gave a very good technical basis to develop an oil painting technique.
I went back to the Doon School for the next nine years painting the local landscapes, farms and the market always getting the same sense of stimulus and satisfaction from each visit In the following nine years I had Alex Millar, Gray Mills and Herb Arris as teachers. Each teacher had his own insights to give.
At Doon I heard about The Artists Workshop an open class art school in Toronto. I attended Saturday classes taught by D.Makague Houston. He had us spend the ten three hour classes making two by three inch drawings from still life set ups to start the development of a sense of how to use the world as a source of beautiful forms, shapes, colours and spaces to make drawings.
This was a vital insight for me since I am still struggling with the same problem forty-five years later. I also took painting classes with Julius Griffith, Tom Hodgson and John Angel, and studied print making with Vera Frenkel and Brian Kelly.
When I first got three weeks holiday in nineteen sixty seven I went to London and painted every day. A typical day started with an early breakfast a walk until I saw something to paint painted; another walk, another watercolor, a lunch of an apple and a sticky bun; another walk and watercolour, a substantial supper,a last watercolour and so to bed. This was repeated twenty times, then home. On the remaining holidays I usually went to one city for three weeks the first time and visited a different city in the middle week the second year.
In the following nine years I painted in London, Cornwall, Venice Florence, Copenhaugen, Oslow, Amsterdam, Bruges, Paris and Aix en Provence.
In Canada I went to Vancouver, then Vancouver and Victoria.
Next I went to Quebec city for two three week holidays following the next two years in Halifax.
The two visits to the same city let me get to know it to a degree and the middle week in another city in the second holidays kept my vision fresh.
I enjoyed all the cities for their variety and the chances that there would be something unexpected around any corner.
In many ways I found Quebec city the most interesting of the cities visited with its wide variety of architecture, and landscape and its interesting people including the artist M.LeBon who took me out painting twice.
I feel I married the art process at about twenty and it has been a very happy and satisfying marriage for fifty years.
I have spent all my artistic life trying to learn to see and understand what is around me, what I enjoy, and learning how what I see and feel can be translated into paint, ink, pencil, wood and photography through the learned and intuited art procedures that give back the sense of life and energy I feel.
Strong colour and tone contrasts,and vigorous shapes make for a strong lively and expressive works of art.
I have taught Continuing Education classes a couple of times a week for the last ten years with an emphasis on learning how to see length, width,and angles among the elements in front of the students,
and tried to help them to to see and enjoy the world around themselves
Thomas Vincent Phillips August 23/2001
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