Monday Inspiration: Walter Joseph Phillips

Walter Joseph Phillips, The Bather, 1923 (source)

Walter Joseph Phillips, Norman Bay, Lake of the Woods, No.1 (source)

Walter Joseph Phillips (1884-1963) was born in England and studied in Paris and South Africa. He moved to Winnipeg Manitoba and used the surrounding Manitoba landscape as his subject matter. I think his prints are amazingly delicate, those slender lines, and gradations of colour lend a watercolour feel to them. Which is unsurprising because he worked in watercolour also. I particularly love the images that contain people within them, and the way that he deals with that interaction. Maybe because his works are so similar to group of seven- but those works have been so criticized for not containing people, or- more rightly- for making the Canadian landscape feel wild and untamed and void of humans, when in reality they mostly painted in parks and cottage country (with a few exceptions of course).