Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1953, Frederick Phillips studied Fine Art under Arthur Berry at Burslem College of Art. He graduated with a BA in 1974.
Following successful exhibitions in the Midlands he moved to London in 1981 and began exhibiting his work there.
In 1990 he was awarded an ‘Artist of Exceptional Merit’ visa by the USA and moved to Chicago where he lived and worked for 17 years. In 1996 he was invited to lecture on ‘Dream and Reality in Art’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2000 a book called ‘Quintessence’ about his life and his art was published in America.
Exhibitions of the artist’s work have been held in London, Chicago, New York, Boston, Indianapolis, Michigan, Puerto Rico and Hong Kong. His work is in private and corporate collections though out the world.
In 2007 he returned to his home town and established a new studio. Frederick has since exhibited in Manchester, Birmingham, Cheshire and Staffordshire. He continues to deal with his collectors in America and Europe.
From 2009 to 2011 he taught life-drawing, part-time, at Staffordshire University. In 2012 he was invited to become a judge in the UNESCO-sponsored ‘International Children’s Exhibition of Fine Art’ in Lidice, Czech Republic. In 2010 he joined an international panel of judges to adjudicate 26,000 artworks by young students from around the world.
In April 2016, Frederick was one of the first to move his studio into the ACAVA Artists’ Studios at the former Spode Works pottery factory in Stoke. Here he continues to create art and plan future exhibitions.
Frederick Phillips is a painter for today who uses the techniques of the past to create the masterpieces of the future.
His atmospheric paintings and drawings are like half-remembered dream images, glimpsed briefly as we awaken. As the artist himself has noted “Originally, I was inspired by the Surrealists. Even today my paintings are not realistic portraits of the world about me. My work is about memory. I don’t paint what I see, but the memory of what I have seen”
