Phillip Thomas

Phillip Thomas is a graduate of the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts, the premier art institution in the anglophone Caribbean, in Kingston Jamaica. At this institution he received the Albert Huie Award for Painting at the end of his four-year study. He later received two educational scholarships in respect of his talent, and in support of his MFA: a CHASE fund grant, given to Promising young artists by the government of Jamaica and a grant from the Cobb Family Foundation, a gesture from America's Ambassador to Jamaica, Sue Cobb.

He attended the esteemed New York Academy of Art and studied under such notable artists as Eric Fischl, Vincent Desidario and Jenny Saville. Since then, Phillip Thomas has been involved innumerous single and group shows such as the Jamaica National Biennial, consecutively, where he has won the top award, the Aaron Matalon award, for his painting "N-Train". he has been exhibited innumerous Hampton, and Miami art fairs since.

Phillip has enjoyed a very successful career. His work has been discussed and collected by various art journals and magazines as well as public and private art collections. The World Bank had acquired his painting “Carousel”, in 2011, and it was hung in Washington DC. His work has been auctioned through institutions such as Sotheby’s and had been repeatedly acquired by the late Peggy Cooper Cafritz, who is noted for assembling the largest collection of African American and the diaspora’s aesthetic output. Phillip has lectured at his undergraduate alma mater, and has sat on many public and private art committees, and received numerous governmental awards for his work and contributions to his practice, most notably to date, he received the Anthony Musgrave Medal for his national contribution to the arts.

Phillip Thomas is considered a "representational painter"and he paints with an ease that demonstrates his sure draftsmanship and understanding of the form, but more importantly he conveys through imagery its emotional development, demands, and conflicts. He harnesses the classical approach of the "traditional language of the academic arts "to present his subject through the lens of a kind of history, the result is a polyglot of imagery and of seeing the ideas that surrounds narrative painting.

Phillip intends to manufacture cultural reliquaries, artifacts and social curiosities that represent the cultural tapestry of the Caribbean and the wider “new world”, using mediums and other agents of the old world. The history of painting and other artifacts in this case are not for the sake of the medium of presentation, but more so as an artifact of works of art and art practices of the past, hence, the entire art object produced is a complete manifestation of an archeological response to agents of the old world as well as products of the new, this cross-pollination has produced the kind of work that Phillip can use to interrogate our new globalized world and all the uncertainties that come with it.

Phillip currently lives and works from Kingston and is represented exclusively by the RJD Gallery, in New York.