Tom Phillips is not only a musician, painter and author, but has also translated (and illustrated) Dante's Inferno. In the 1960s he was best known as a composer, and he taught music at York University. By the 70s he was becoming celebrated as a painter. His portraits, which include Iris Murdoch and Harrison Birtwhistle, are amongst the gems of the National Portrait Gallery's modern collection.
Phillips' visual works have always had a strong textual basis. This is most evident in his extraordinary Curriculum Vitae series in which he described, through painted poems, the formative influences of his life. Another body of work, entitled The Humument, took an old Victorian novel and, by painting over most of the text, created a new narrative from the remaining words. Both these series demonstrate a unique fusion of text and image, reminiscent of the great age of manuscript illumination.
In addition to music, painting, poetry and literary translation, Phillips has also worked with photography, recording the changing landscape of his native Camberwell over the last twenty five years, and collaborated with the film director Peter Greenaway on A TV Dante.
His print oeuvre is not large but is considered highly intellectual and most of his screenprints and lithographs incorporate text

see the artist's website at http://www.tomphillips.co.uk