About

Artist Statement

For over thirty years, Philip Lindsey has explored the language of painting through several bodies of work. The first, a formalist language of expressive gestural abstraction. The second, a journey into personal narrative through metaphor and allegory, and a third, investigating a sense of place through landscape and plein air.

Abstraction
The purity of abstraction and eloquence of poetics developed into a vast language derived from a vocabulary of limitations. Series evolved as the language grew, with materials informing process and decisions concerning form,space, scale and complexity. Stasis, dynamics, structure, and tension locates the core of these investigations.

Figure and Personal Narrative
A new language emerged as a new purpose was revealed through fatherhood. Single-scene and multi-episodic formats combine direct and indirect painting processes, to explore the density of relationships through metaphorical themes.

Landscape
The careful observation of light, atmosphere, time, and place is the focus of this body of work. It is an opportunity to participate in nature, and attempt to realize sensations, as Cezanne once wrote, of an experience and feeling of place, through the poetry of painting.

Biography

Philip Lindsey's work has been selected by major museum curators for national and international juried exhibitions.  Lowery Stokes Simms (Museum of Modern Art, and Museum of Arts and Design), Kathryn Calley Galitz (Metropolitan Museum ofArt), Ann Prentice Wagner (Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Arkansas Art Center), and Yvette Lee (Whitney Museum of American Art) are among curators who have selected his paintings and drawings for exhibition.

Lindsey holds rank of Professor of Fine Arts at Wilson College, where he teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs. He also directs Wilson’s Cooley Art Gallery.

Lindsey is the recipient of the 2018 President’s Award for Outstanding Service to Wilson College, the Donald F. Bletz Award for Outstanding Devotion to the Art of Teaching, the Paul Swain Havens Research Scholars Award, a Summer Research Stipend, a Humanities Division Scholars Award, Sabbatical Leave for research and scholarship, and the Drusilla Stevens Mazur Research Professorship.

Using Format