Biography
Philip Lindsey is an artist recognized for both abstract and representational painting and drawing, with work selected by major museum curators for inclusion in 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 museum curators who have selected Lindsey's work for exhibition.
Lindsey holds rank of Professor of Fine Arts at Wilson College, where he teaches painting, drawing, and graphic design. He curates Wilson’s Bogigian Art Gallery, and chairs the Division of Arts & Letters.
Lindsey is a 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.
Artist Statement
Philip Lindsey divides his creative output into two bodies of work. One, a formalist language of expressive, gestural abstraction dating to his earliest explorations as a painter. The other, a journey into personal narrative through metaphor and allegory that began with the birth of his daughter, 16 years ago.
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.
Narrative grew out of necessity, and 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 density and complexity of relationships through metaphorical themes. Rebecca Massie Lane, Director of the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, said this about Lindsey in an exhibition catalog “…Lindsey’s paintings have to do with identity, relationships, and the meaning of art as an allegory for life. In the end, what is apparent is the artist’s honesty, his respect for his artistic precedents, his love for family and his devotion to painting.”