Asheville-based painter Jeremy Phillips hits play on our love for lo-fi beauty
“Why make paintings anymore?”
An unexpected—and complex—question from modern abstract painter and collage artist Jeremy Phillips has a deceptively simple answer: “They are something solid in a digital world, images that linger long after the media circus has flown by . . . A painting should be something you can live with, that keeps talking back.”
Similar to his worldview, the teaching artist and self-proclaimed “record freak” uses luscious oil paint and reclaimed materials like old vinyl albums to create deceptively simple works of art that, upon closer inspection, draw you into shapes and scenes that slowly unlock like a vibrant, shifting puzzle. Deconstructed interiors, evocative aerial views, impossible forms, binaries, and towers of Babel evoke perspectives at once entirely familiar, yet endlessly unexpected.
Recently, his love of music has won the attention of collectors worldwide through a fun, fascinating body of work crafted from vinyl—some of which was even salvaged from the wreckage of Hurricane Helene. “I still buy vinyl records and have hundreds of them—that’s the only way we listen to music at my house,” reveals Phillips. “So, making art with records was really exciting for me.”
Musical Work of Jeremy Phillips
Phillips’s musical work varies from realistic scenes of record players in warm spaces surrounded by the ephemera of audiophile life to sculptural, intricate pieces made using a utility knife to carve up albums and create rolling waves. Then there are the collages that use broken records to recreate photographs Phillips has taken of West Asheville churches at nighttime, the dark sky behind each steeple whorling with vinyl grooves.
Phillips credits the enthusiasm for this series partly to the resurgence of vinyl. “People like things that aren’t digital, and [these] paintings are made with materials that are so resolutely analog. It reinforces the whole idea of art that is made by hand, and people love records they recognize,” says Phillips, pointing to collages made only with copies of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles.
“People love things that are familiar in new ways, and that is what my art is all about: rendering the mundane as magical.”
See a Local Exhibition
“Faces, Places & Layered Dreams,” featuring Aaron Tucker, Jeremy Phillips, and Mark Flowers
Upstate Gallery on Main, 172 E. Main St., Spartanburg
On display through August 21
- Velvet Underground, White Light White Heat
- Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation
- Yo La Tengo, Fade
Meet the Artist
Pink Dog Creative, 344 Depot St., Ste. 103, in the River Arts District, Asheville, NC
Studio hours on weekends only
jeremyphillipsart.com
