Much
of my art deals with the subject of man's inhumanity to man. My
artistic aspirations are to heighten the viewers awareness of what
has happened and what is happening to the human condition today
as well as to raise pertinent questions and, ideally, to evoke an
emotional and thought-provoking response. Admittedly, there are
some scenes that may confront the psyche as shocking at first, but
my hope is that upon closer examination and after further contemplation,
these pieces will reveal themselves in the positive way in which
they are intended.
I believe that everyone has the capacity to respond to art, although
that capacity is not always activated. To truly respond to a work
of art, it is necessary first of all to suspend all labels and prejudices
and not to lock yourself inside the walls of your own ego. Be open
to what the work has to offer you and let the work speak to you
without setting up preconditions, without in any way defending the
fragility of your own ego. True works of art sometimes teach us
things about ourselves we have no desire to know. Art can take you
into another's vision only to bring you back to your own truth.
This is not an easy task because our eyes are not innocent. Try
to see as a child sees. A child sees innocently. A child sees what's
there. A child doesn't see with labels and prejudices because it
doesn't know about them. This is not to say that we should respond
as a child responds. The act of seeing comes first, followed by
the act of response. A child does not have the capacity to respond
with great depth, but, as adults, we do. So try to get the look
of the child who sees what's there, coupled with the response of
an adult who sees from the great depths of experience.
Understanding often comes with looking, and waiting, and looking
again. A true work of art that is created from the depths of one's
soul, is on rare occasions easily understood just at a glance. Art
can offer up tremendous joy, and it can increase our capacity to
accept darkness and pain. Ideally, it can make us more sensitive
and more alert. Because art is demanding of your attention, it can
help you become a more attentive person.
In my humble opinion, the greatest and most spiritual art movement
of the twentieth century came along with the surrealists. Artists
like Dali, Magritte, Duchamp, Schwitters, Man Ray, and many others
began to explore art from a truly unique perspective. They began
to view the world from the outside looking in rather than from the
inside looking out. Basically, they began to render visible thought.
They opened up strange new worlds of art that coincided with the
tenets of such great thinkers as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud.
In the world of the surrealist, an artist can change reality. Surrealists
conjure up a logic that contradicts the laws of common perception.
The surrealists were painters of ideas, of visible thoughts, rather
than of subjects. They began to reveal the hidden nature of man
rather than the visible world around him. Most of their work was
associated with dreams and the subconscious, rather than the physical
world. In the surrealist manifesto, Andre Breton stated that the
goal of the surrealists was to reunite the conscious and unconscious
realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy
would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute
reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted
from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring
of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility
to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained
by poets and painters alike.
Critics have sometimes described my work as a kind of social surrealism
and I have no qualms with this description. I make no attempt at
persuading anyone to think as I think, I merely comment on the world
as I see it, and if my personal truths happen to coincide with those
personal truths of the viewer, then on some mystical plane, at some
inexplicable level, I believe we both benefit.
I consider my art to be conceptual as opposed to literal or abstract.
Much of my work deals with ideas and I often employ symbolism toward
that end. My goal is to create an idea that carries with it a force
that will strike a familiar chord within the viewer, and perhaps
takes them by surprise. I want to take you to a place you've never
seen, yet make you feel as though you've been there.
My technique is rather simple, nothing mysterious. I rely heavily
on instinct, mostly flying by the seat of my pants. Having no preconceived
idea as to what my next piece will be about, I sit with a stack
of old magazines, mostly National Geographics and Smithsonians simply
because they have the best photographs, and I thumb through them
until I find an object or a scene that moves me in some way. I then
begin building on that object or that idea in the same fashion,
a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle I've never seen fully
assembled. I keep this technique up until I feel that a concept
is developing-sometimes I'm not sure what the piece is about until
I find the last piece of the puzzle.
So partly by choice and partly by chance I arrive at some combination
of images that works well together to form an idea. I often work
on several pieces at one time, using an X-acto knife to trim the
pieces out of the magazines and acid-free rubber cement to assemble
them. Once I feel the work is complete, I dry-mount it on acid-free
foam board and frame it in a simple frame. I never sign the front
of my work because I feel that this becomes a distraction for the
viewer. I want them to fully digest what's there with absolutely
no hindrance. I also title the pieces on the back because I want
to allow the viewer the luxury of forming their own opinion of the
work before they know what I think about it.
I use all the concepts of proper design within my compositions;
repetition, figure/ground, color theory, scale, chiaroscuro, tonal
quality, etc. I want the piece to work first of all on an aesthetic
level and secondly on a personal, thought-provoking level. I feel
that this is what gives the work its initial power. I often bend
the rules of scale and juxtapose unusual objects, but I always try
to maintain the proper quality of lighting throughout the piece,
including the proper direction of the shadows, soft and hard light,
color range, etc. I also try to keep the angles and positions of
the objects in each piece in the proper perspective.
I believe that by creating that which never existed, and generally,
that which cannot exist, with photographic clarity, I infuse the
work with a force that it otherwise would not have. Much of my work
is intended to be humorous, but isn't always seen that way at first
glance. However, I think upon close examination, one would find
a touch of humor in even the darkest of my images.
Excerpt from: Art Review, Flagpole Magazine, 10-4-2000, Volume
4, Number 40
Images As Icons. J. Phillip White is something
of a magician. Wielding an X-acto knife instead of a wand, he conjures
complex coded illustrations and compelling, powerful photomontage
compositions out of not-so-thin air. Reaching into the realm of
the photojournalist, the pop icon and the dizzying billions of images
used to convey everything we know, White culls photos from hundreds
of discarded magazines, dissects them, and then recombines them
to create brilliant scenes of cleverly mixed metaphors and mystical
significance. By recycling images removed from their original contexts
and juxtaposing them like free verse within unexpected realms, against
alien skies, the artist creates a plane of altered reality wherein
the mind takes intuitive leaps in order to make sense of what the
eye sees. These leaps of imagination result in new symbols and new
concepts born within us, insights into our own souls and renewed
awareness of the world around us.
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