BA in Fine Art at Gloucestershire College of Art in 1982 MA in Painting at Birmingham Polytechnic in 1984

In 1987-1988 Philip was Artist in Residence at The National Gallery, London. After this seminal period, Philip was represented by the London galleries, New Academy Gallery and Rocket Gallery. Subsequently, he was Artist in Residence at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, USA; Fundación Valparaíso, Mojácar, Spain; Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur, India; Lowick House Print Workshop, Cumbria, UK and at Bemis Center, Nebraska, USA.

With initial funding from a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Award, Philip made three extensive visits to the high desert regions of the south west USA – New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and Utah – which culminated in an ongoing series of paintings called The Western Lands which were exhibited in London in 1991 and 1993.  In 1994 he was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award to continue with this series of paintings.

After several previous extended periods living and painting in Greece, in 1999 Philip spent three months in Athens working on a full-size reconstruction of a 1450 B.C. Minoan painted fresco room. This work was a focal point in the 1999-2001 touring archaeological exhibition Fresco - A Passport into the Past, which was shown at the Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens: and subsequently in Heraklion, Crete, and Karlsruhe, Germany.  In 1999 and again in 2005 he spent a period of time in Tokyo amassing material for a series of paintings entitled Mono No Aware.

Philip’s creativity also finds an outlet in the making of one-off books, comics and 25 years of mail art envelopes.  Since 2002 he has been a contributor to and co-editor of the limited-edition artists’ publication Issue. 

Philip’s wide-ranging interests, natural curiosity and passion for reading has led him to explore subjects as diverse as quantum physics, chemistry, biodiversity, the ancient world and the complexity of plants – a National Garden Festival proposal was rejected by the judges for being too “horticulturally anarchic”. 

Philip now lives and works in Dorset, surrounded by a folded landscape with expansive ever-changing skies.