Walter J. Phillips was born on 25 October 1884 at Barton-on-Humber in Lincolnshire, England. Trained as a watercolour painter in England, he worked as a commercial artist in Manchester and as an Art Master in Salisbury. In 1910 he married Gladys Pitcher and in 1913 the couple and their first child moved to Canada. They settled in Winnipeg where Phillips lived and worked for almost thirty years.
From 1913 until 1924 Phillips worked as Art Master at St. John’s, a technical school in Winnipeg, while continuing his own art practice. In 1915 he learned how to make etchings but soon found that he missed the expressive use of colour. In 1917 Phillips began experimenting with colour wood-cut prints and was immediately transfixed by the aesthetic possibilities and technical challenges that this new medium offered. Largely self-taught, he rapidly mastered the medium.
Although Phillips never developed an emotional attachment to Winnipeg (in fact, he longed to return to his native country), he nevertheless created works like A Suburban Street, Winnipeg (1920) that effectively reflected his local surroundings. Despite the fact that a number of Phillips’ works featured urban scenes and often included people, he was primarily a landscape artist. Phillips spent a good deal of time traveling to the rural areas around Winnipeg, painting watercolour sketches that he then turned into colour wood-cuts. Phillips’ landscapes were selective rather than literal renderings of nature and he frequently modified his original sketches to produce more dynamic compositions. For example, when he reworked his watercolour sketch Crowe’s Island, Lake of the Woods (1919) into a colour wood-cut, he included a canoe for visual interest.
The dissemination of Phillips’ work in print form helped to bolster his reputation. In 1919 six of his colour wood-cuts were reproduced in The International Studio (among them Crowe’s Island, Lake of the Woods), and he soon became known as one of Canada’s best-known wood-cut printmakers. In 1926 he published The Technique of the Colour Wood-Cut and, between 1928 and 1936, he published four folios of his colour wood-cuts. He also illustrated a number of books and wrote a regular column on art in the Winnipeg Tribune. Although Phillips considered himself foremost a watercolour artist, printmaking developed into a lucrative career and allowed him to support his wife and six children during the Great Depression by his art alone.
Phillips was inventive and borrowed freely from many styles, including the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements. During a momentous trip to England in 1924-25 he met Allen W. Seaby and William Giles, two artists who were involved in the colour print revival. On the same trip he met the renowned Japanese print-maker Yoshijiro Urushibara who taught him the correct method for sizing paper. This technical knowledge enabled Phillips to achieve more subtle effects in his printing.
In the summer of 1926 Phillips made his first trip to Canada’s west coast; he was impressed by the scenery and returned as often as he could over the next 15 years. In 1926 he also began to keep systematic sketchbooks documenting what he saw. He later worked many of these sketches into watercolour paintings and colour wood-cuts. Karlukwees, B.C. (1929) is one of a number of different renderings that resulted from a trip to the west coast in the summer of 1929. In what is considered to be his most famous colour wood-cut, Phillips has depicted the village blanketed in snow.
Although some of Phillips’ works, such as Jack Pine (1940) aesthetically resembled paintings by the Group of Seven, Phillips did not share the Group’s nationalistic ideology. In fact, he disliked the monopoly that the Group exerted over the Canadian art world. What interested Phillips primarily was composition and technique, and he was willing to attempt new methods of printmaking. In 1922 he began experimenting with wood engravings with great success and works like Dog Teams on the River (1931) utilize bold lines to produce a simple, yet dynamic, composition.
In 1943 Phillips and his wife moved to Banff, Alberta, where he completed works such as Indian Days, Banff (1945). He continued to produce prints until 1952 when he returned to his first love — watercolour painting. In a cruel twist of fate he developed cataracts and because of his failing eyesight he retired from the art world in 1959. He and Gladys moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where he died on 5 July 1963.
Katie Cholette
Associate Editor