Philip J Brittan is a British artist working with a broad range of media. After work as a university lecturer and commercial photographer, Philip has gradually shifted his attention to an art practice that combines photography, painting and various fine art printing techniques. He embraces the full range of the photographic medium, combining old analogue processes like cyanotype, tintype and the collodion negative with the latest digital techniques of image production and presentation. In particular, Philip explores the boundaries between the conventional notion of the instant reality of photography and the slow mark making of painting.
Philip’s methodology is experimental and slow, with images created over an extended period of time, the outcome of a chain of accumulative individual processes. Moving back and forth across the digital divide, and giving both colour and black and white imagery equal attention, Philip blends different mediums with the creative treatment and use of a wide range of materials and processes, often blurring the line between representation and abstraction.
Book making is central to Philip’s working practice and he has published numerous artist and commercially produced books that document his developing mix of processes and experimentation.
Last Garden is work Philip made in his mother's beautiful garden that she became too frail to maintain in the last months of her life. Prints were buried in the garden (some with fabrics from the house) for extended periods of time, allowing the place to mark the work in a very direct way. Autumn River is an attempt to provide a fresh perspective on a subject all too obviously weighed down with photographic precedent. Work made with some of the millions of decaying leaves that fall into the River Frome, in the south west of England, and are carried, like brightly coloured jewels, along its length each year. Ghosts Are Real is about memory, time and place and the myriad, often confusing ways in which they relate to each other. Encompassing diverse camera methods, experimental processing, a range of media and various fine-art print making techniques, Ghosts Are Real is a glorious full-bleed expression of beauty, colour and abstraction. MB1+MB2 and MB3+MB4 present landscape images inspired by the unique landscape of the Morecambe Bay area in the north west of England. The work alternates black and white and colour images that mix figurative and abstract, digital and analogue.
Another side of Morecambe is shown in the series Bring Me Sunshine. Here we see further evidence of the decline of the retail sector which is an international problem, but also the impact of ten years of Conservative imposed austerity in the UK.
Born in Bristol. MA, PhD
t: +44 (0) 7985642959
See also: PJB Editions