Walter J. Phillips was born in Barton-on-Humber in Lincolnshire, England in 1884. He was trained as a watercolourist, and worked as a commercial artist and as an art master in Salisbury. He married and moved to Canada in 1913 when he was 29 years old.
Phillips is notable as an artist, for he wasn't nurtured in the Group of Seven, mythos of the Canadian Survival theme - where we are a people whose culture has been imprinted by generations of having to cope with antagonistic forces of nature in an inhospitable climate.
Phillips immigrated into a Canada with urban centres and the rugged wildnerness imprint wasn't part of his psyche, which is interesting for he was primarily a landscape painter. The difference was in the way he viewed nature.
There is much to be said of Phillips's success as a watercolourist, for he raised six children during the depression, on the back of his art alone. He went on to live in Banff, Alberta and he eventually moved to Victoria where he died in 1963.
Pavilion Gallery, Assiniboine Park, Winnipeg. Where half the second floor is dedicated to his works.
references:
The Underhill Review. Click here.
Sharecom. Click here.
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