Benjamin Phillips
We visited Benjamin Phillips in his Hastings studio, where we were surrounded by all his creations.
“When I think about Hastings and St Leonards, there are a lot of great artists and freelance creatives which are all kind of interconnected, and there are so many opportunities to collaborate.”
Tell us about your education and finding the direction you wanted to go down.
Benjamin. I was labelled a naughty boy at school. My teacher, Mrs Jones, said I was acting backwards in one of my parent-teacher meetings. When I was playing up, they called me neB, which is Ben back to front. I was always attention-seeking; well, that is how it was framed. Maybe today, they’d label me as something else.
But drawing was a redemptive thing for me. I won many art competitions in school, and it was always in my head that I’d be an artist. However, I didn’t know any artists or people who did creative professional jobs. The person closest to that was my friend’s Dad, a signwriter.
My tutor, Dan, was very inspiring when I got to college. He was quite a young teacher in his late twenties. He was an enthusiastic and talented painter; he played to everyone’s strengths to get the most out of them by tailoring their education, and I felt like he took me under his wing.
I had a disrupted Foundation year because I slipped a disc in my spine when I was just 17. It didn’t resolve itself, and I was left with massively debilitating chronic pain. I had a lumbar discectomy, where they removed the herniated disc. It’s a procedure that most people usually get done in their eighties or nineties. It was pretty successful, but it screwed up my Foundation year, and I still live with pain today, 20 years on.
I took a year out after my Foundation; I didn’t get into the courses that I wanted to get into. After my A-Levels, I returned and worked at the college for a year as a technician in the art department and spent my evenings creating a whole new portfolio, with Dan giving me one-to-one help. By that point, I’d concluded that I wanted to do illustration. I’d always been on the fence about whether I wanted to do fine art or illustration. But I’ve since tiptoed on a line between the two and dip in and out of either side.
I was into expressionist artists like Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele and became interested in printmaking after seeing Otto Dix’s war etchings. Even though I wanted to study illustration, I wasn’t fan-boying any illustrators significantly. I’ve always been excited by people who take a straightforward approach to making work and do whatever they want with it. For example, someone like David Shrigley can work on white paper with a black pen, and it’s immediate, and then you can go anywhere you want with that. But now, if you do a line drawing on a white piece of paper with a black pen, people instantly compare it to Shrigley.
“I still wanted to keep things broad, so if I did a colourful painting, I would juxtapose that by doing etching and just working in monochrome or then making stuff with clay and wanting to treat a project as something that could be punctuated. And then you move on to something else. It’s non-committal.”
I’m getting past that now. However, this was my mindset in those early days when I finished that year working as a technician and made a good portfolio. I got onto all the courses that I wanted to. I went to Bristol UWE because it was a split course with animation and illustration. I stuck it out for a few months but was disappointed and transferred to Brighton. At first, I wasn’t happy there either and almost switched back, but I wimped out and stayed in Brighton. I had it in my head that art school would be this new chapter and the start of a fantastic career, but it was slightly anti-climactic for me. I put too much emphasis on this being the opportunity for happiness after some difficult teenage years.
“For me, it is about self-expression and having fun; it is as much about enjoying the materials you’re working with as the idea itself.”
There’s the assumption that you create kid’s books if you’re an illustrator. But I found at Brighton Uni that there was so little focus on that. The tutors were almost over that part of the illustrator market. And they wanted everyone to be rock stars or conceptual artists.
The print studio was the part of the university I got the most out of. I used the etching suite from the first year and worked with hard-ground etching; it just elevates your drawing. Rather than drawing with a pen, you are scribing through the ground. Then, when you finish, you immerse the metal plate in the acid bath, making what feels like a historical object. It is such an old process, but if you create something current using this historical method, it is very exciting.
What were some of your early commissioned projects?
Benjamin. In my first year at uni, I was lucky to get a job working for Dinosaur Magazine, where I would do six pages of a comic about a character called Dinoboy. A boy finds a dinosaur tooth, very precariously scratches himself with it, and transforms into this anthropomorphised dinosaur. The publisher gave me the brief, and I developed their vision. It’s not work that I would’ve created independently. It was not in a style I naturally worked in, but it paid well and was a monthly gig for maybe a year.
Then I met Katie and Rosa in a band called Peggy Sue, an indie folk duo in Brighton. I created many record designs for them, including EPs, singles, and album covers. I loved working with bands, just being given a bunch of songs and then doing a visual interpretation of their lyrics and just the feel of the music. Today, with streaming music and thumbnail-size cover images, it is impossible to make money doing that, not to mention how hard it is to survive as a recording artist.
After uni, I moved to South London and into a shared house with a bunch of friends who also graduated from Brighton. I was doing whatever commissions I could get from my bedroom/makeshift studio alongside a part-time job in a coffee shop and decorating work.
I had this weird spell where I got a job in a branding agency in Soho. Someone with the same name as me applied for this job, and they’d looked up Ben Phillips and found my website and thought, oh, he’s an OK illustrator. We’ll give him the paid internship. They worked out what had happened but said, ‘if you want to do it, we’ll take you on’. About ten of us were given this internship for six weeks. Then, from the ten, two of us were offered a job. I was lucky, as I never applied for that job. But I hated it, it wasn’t for me.
After six months at that job, I went to South Korea as I got onto an artist residency program. That was quite a pivotal time for me because I’d never lived
for any amount of time outside of the UK. I had a room and a studio space and could make work. It was more of a fine art environment, and they had
a great gallery on site where we had group shows. It was a nurturing environment. The residency lasted four months, then I stayed on for a few more months and lived in Seoul.
I’d been working on my first graphic novel, Peanutborough and Cucumberland. It was a collaborative project with a friend of mine, Yeji Yun, another illustrator. We were a little naïve as this was the first time we had made a large book like this. We took a simple idea; Yeji had been misreading Cumberland sausages as Cucumberland. She thought that was a cute name for a town in England. So we went on a rant; in a time long ago, part of the United Kingdom had been inhabited by cucumber people. If Cucumber Land exists, then what if Peterborough was Peanut Borough? So, we had two kingdoms of different culinary creatures. It leads to a big civil war. We did half of the book in London and the other half in Seoul, and that’s where the book was published.
You are very prolific, and we’ve seen a variety of your work around; when did you move to this area?
Benjamin. When I returned to London from South Korea, I bumbled along from project to project for a while, and not too long after that, I moved to Hastings. I was surprised by the opportunities to create public work here; I painted murals for Source Park and Coastal Currents, and I would have people sit for portraits, usually at art fairs, which became something I was known for. I still have people come to my studio from time to time.
I’d been collaborating with ceramicists, first with Emma Gaston. She threw small terracotta pots, then applied a layer of white slip; I’d visit her studio and create sgraffito designs onto them. A few years back, I did a ceramics course at Hastings College, making vases, working with glazes, doing more intricate designs, and making large ceramic heads.
I illustrated the Coastal Culture Trail map, which connected what was then the Jerwood Gallery, De La Warr Pavilion and Towner Eastbourne. The map encourages people to cycle the 18-mile stretch, and that project led to more maps.
Over the last year or two, I’ve had several projects lined up. You could see what I’m making now and assume that I’ve been making books forever, and that’s always been the intention. However, I didn’t really know how to tackle a commercial book project a few years ago.
When I started communicating with Ziggy Hanaor, the author of Alte Zachen, who also runs the publishing house Cicada Books, I had to work hard to figure out what my visual language would be for this book. It’s a challenge to make a 70-page book of illustrations from seven pages of a manuscript and turn that into a physical book. You receive the dialogue, not a pre-planned list of images to create.
I don’t live in New York, so you have to imagine what that existence would be like. I’d often be on Google Maps, compiling references and trying to figure out how to draw an old person. It sounds like a silly thing to say, but I hadn’t drawn old people very much at that time. But I enjoy drawing them now.
I learned so much from creating Alte Zachen; off the back of that, I’m doing other books. The illustrations were shortlisted for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration 2023, which is pretty big in the illustration world. It’s a wave that, hopefully, I can ride for a while. I’m currently finishing up a book project with Michael Rosen that will be coming out in early 2025, which I’m excited about.
I’m seeing some reoccurring motifs in my work, like drawings of crowds of people and this muted colour palette. There is something quite sweet and almost humbling seeing a body of work begin to emerge.
Last month, I ran a workshop at Introduced on Kings Road. I was working with a group of six to 10-year-olds. You have got to know who you are talking to.
If I start talking about visual language and narrative with some six-year-olds, they will look at me and wonder what he is talking about. At that age, they like to get started and enjoy what they’re doing. So, I play off them and ensure the activity is not intimidating. I am a dad and am so happy hanging out with kids. I enjoy how they are so uninhibited to create; seeing it is amazing.
Along with my partner, Jazmine (RyeZine No.8), we have a community interest company, The Museum of Us, which aims to give opportunities to creatives in Hastings and St Leonards who may need additional support on such projects. We put on a show of William Shepherd’s work at what was The Dirty Old Gallery last year.
Weekly, I meet up with Amy Fenton. Amy is a neurodiverse artist, and we create works together. Usually, I draw, and she then adds colour to the work, either with ink and a brush or with coloured pencils. We make a range of different scale drawings and never know what we’ll make until it’s made, and we’re accumulating quite a large body of work. Some of which were included in last year’s Brewers Towner International prize.
“Not one project gave me enough to survive on. I had to be several different makers to exist as a creator. The creative industry is often projected as quite glamorous, but frugality is quite an underrated skill.”
Benjamin Phillips
Benjamin Phillips
Artist & Illustrator
www.benjaminphillips.co.uk
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