Trevor Thomas Phillips (25 May 1937 – 28 November 2022) was an English visual artist. He was a painter, printmaker and collagist.
Trevor Thomas Phillips was born on 25 May 1937 in Clapham, London to David and Margaret Phillips (née Arnold). He was the younger of two sons.
In 1940, the cotton market collapsed and the Phillips family had to sell their home. Phillips' father went to work in Abergavenny in Wales, leaving his wife to run the boarding-house in London. After the war, the family finances improved and they were able to holiday annually in France and Germany. His parents began to buy short leasehold properties as investments and although these did not yield the return that they wished, his mother did buy the freehold of one house, which would later become her son's studio and home.
From 1942 to 1947, Phillips attended Bonneville Road Primary School in Clapham. He said that while he was there he "learned the word artist and discovered that an artist is someone who does not have to put his paints away, so [I] decided to become one". Although he enjoyed school, he was noted for his fascination with drawing and his refusal to conform. His mother recalled him buying a platform ticket every Sunday and taking long railway journeys when he was just 11 years old.
Phillips progressed to Henry Thornton Grammar School in Clapham, where he developed his love of music, playing violin and bassoon in the school orchestra and singing solo baritone in school concerts and stage events.
In 1954, Phillips exhibited paintings for the first time, in an open art show on the railings of the Thames Embankment. A year later, aged 17, he won a travel scholarship to France, where he lived for three months. His mother remembers him returning to London with a sack of horse bones from the First World War. He had also bought himself a piano and started to teach himself to play.
In 1957, Phillips became a founder member of the Philharmonia Chorus.
From 1958 to 1960, Phillips read English Literature and Anglo Saxon at St Catherine's College, Oxford. Whilst there, he attended life-drawing classes at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, acted in plays, and designed and illustrated the Isis magazine.
Upon graduation, Phillips taught Art, Music and English at Aristotle Road School in Brixton, London. He also attended evening classes in life drawing, under Frank Auerbach, and sculpture at Camberwell College of Arts, where he became a full-time student in 1961, graduating in 1964.
In 1964, Phillips' work was selected for that year's Young Contemporaries Exhibition in London and, in the following year, the AIA Galleries in London exhibited his first one-man show.
Phillips became a teacher at Ipswich School of Art. One of his students was Brian Eno, who would become a lifelong friend and with whom he would later collaborate with (from 1966 onwards). Phillips soon moved to teach Liberal Studies at Walthamstow Polytechnic, where he met the pianist John Tilbury and participated in improvisation concerts at several polytechnics.
In 1966, Phillips exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition for the first time, started work on A Humument.
When Cornelius Cardew founded the Scratch Orchestra, its constitution was drafted in Phillips' garden in Bath (where he had become a teacher at the Bath Academy of Art) and he participated in most of the concerts until he became disillusioned with its politicization.
In 1968, Phillips moved to Wolverhampton to teach at Wolverhampton School of Art, and he had a second one-man exhibition, at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham.
Throughout the 1970s Phillips' works were exhibited widely in one-man shows and collections.
After a period as a visiting tutor at the Art School in Kassel, Germany, he abandoned teaching and took his first trip to Africa. In 1973, he began the 20 Sites n Years photographic project. In 1975, his first significant publication, Works/Texts I, was published by Hansjörg Mayer and his first retrospective exhibition toured Europe. This was also the year that he met Marvin and Ruth Sackner, who were to become his patrons and founded an archive in Miami to house most of his work.
1974 saw the completion of the privately printed edition of A Humument, which had been published in ten sections since 1971.
In 1978, Brian Eno produced a recording of Irma for Obscure Records directed by Gavin Bryars with a cast including Howard Skempton and Phillips himself. Phillips began contributing regular reviews to The Times Literary Supplement (now TLS).