Andrew Phillips - Artist & Therapist

11/04/2026

I'm delighted that 'At The Roots of Silence' has been selected for the inaugural exhibition at The Boleskine House Foundation, overlooking Loch Ness in Scotland. The Grand Opening is underway this weekend, with the property open to the public for the first time in 260 years.

Boleskine is a place steeped in local history, as well as more widely known due to mysterious associations with former estate owner Aleister Crowley, a prominent thread within the rich tapestry of Western mystery traditions during the late 19th and early 20th century.

The building itself was devastated by fire in recent years, and has undergone a complete rebuild/renovation. From what I have seen it looks like there has been tremendous attention to quality and detail in all aspects, creating a characterful environment for the charitable foundation to go about its mission.

With an emphasis on heritage, arts, and culture, the organisation is developing a library dedicated to the scholarly study of esotericism, and looks set to become a deeply important center for spiritual nourishment in the UK.

For further information you can follow the link in my bio to a recent blog post, or visit the Boleskine website.

At The Roots of Silence
Acrylic on wood panel
40.5 x 40.5 cm
2022

This painting is available, please contact me to enquire.

05/04/2026

By Your Own Light

Acrylic ink, pastel, graphite, on paper
Paper size: 56.5 x 29.5 cm
Image size: 52.5 x 25.5 cm
2026

Available from my website.

The pastel is applied by first crumbling it onto the paper in small amounts, and then smoothing it across the surface by hand. The mountain areas are made using a dip pen with fine nib, or mechanical pencil.


The title takes inspiration from the R.S.Thomas poem The Bright Field.

The poem suggests to me that we must be careful our attention is not consumed by a future that can only ever offer one certainty - no matter the intensity and persistence of any goals or targets we may set for ourselves. Perhaps a sharpened awareness of what is already present within and without, is what truly leads to renewal, lest we manage to lose our Self in the seeking of it.

Many wisdom traditions teach that the presence of true longing can only ever be for something that is already known in some way, and can be greeted as the resonance within an individual of a universal life, or the call of the divine.

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

- R.S. Thomas

26/03/2026

Ghosts in the Nursery

I recently visited this intriguing exhibition by Abigail Norris at Julian Page Chichester. The title of the show comes from a paper by the psychoanalyst Selma Freiburg, which instantly took me back to my time as a trainee at Goldsmiths when I first encountered it.

Moving through the exhibition, between the different dimensions of painting and installation, I had this sense of how the 'ghosts' Freiburg so vividly describes, show up in our lives and in the therapy space. Tangible presences, familiar yet something is unknown, they are both of central significance but only glimpsed in their symbolic forms at the periphery.

"In every nursery there are ghosts. They are the visitors from the unremembered past of the parents. The uninvited guests at the christening. Under all favourable circumstances, the unfriendly and unbidden spirits are banished from the nursery and return to their subterranean dwelling place. The baby makes his own imperative claim upon parental love and, in strict analogy with the fairytales, the bonds of love protect the child and his parents against the intruders. the malevolent ghosts. This is not to say that ghosts cannot invent mischief from their burial places."

- Selma Fraiberg

22/03/2026

Studio update: 22.03

15/03/2026

The Silent Knowing

Acrylic ink, pastel, graphite, on paper
Paper size: 56.5 x 29.5 cm
Image size: 52.5 x 25.5 cm 2026
2026

Available from my website.

05/03/2026

01/03/2026

Studio update: 1.3

27/02/2026

On the shoulder of Sugar Loaf.

26/02/2026

Having the 'whole dream'. I appreciate what Segal says about imagination in the following passage...

"Day-dreams, understandably, have a bad press in psychoanalysis. And yet they are not far from something highly valued, that is, imagination. Day-dreams can be the beginning of story-telling....When Proust's Elstir, the painter, says, "If a little dreaming is dangerous the cure for it is not less dreaming but more dreaming, the whole dream", he speaks not of night dreams but of day-dreams....I like to think that Elstir's 'more dreaming', 'the whole dream', refers to the move from day-dreaming to imagination. The whole dream, to my mind, means less splitting, more integration, and reaching deeper layers of the mind.

Freud has said that the artist's fantasy must loose its egocentric character to become compatible with art. 'Losing the egocentric character', I think involves a modification of the pleasure principle. It necessitates integrating ones perceptions of external reality that includes others and the perception of one's own relation to them. It also includes perceptions of the relation between them.

In other words, imagination, unlike the typical day-dream, necessitates some abandonment of omnipotence and some facing of the depressive position. This makes imagination richer and more complex than a wish-fulfilling day-dream. The deeper layers of the mind which can thus be mobilized, the richer, denser, and more flexible is imagination."

— Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art
Chapter 8 - Imagination, play and art

22/02/2026

Studio update: 22.02.26

19/02/2026

Forgotten Coast

Acrylic ink, iron gall ink, pastel, graphite, on Fabriano paper

Paper size: 56.5 x 29.5 cm
Image size: 52.5 x 25.5 cm
2026
£290 (Inc p&p to UK)
Available from my website

There is something about coasts and memory. Perhaps it is the ever shifting surface and sounds of the water which lends itself so well to describing the ungraspable nature of human experience. When we reach a shoreline we stop, or proceed very little further into the element, even though it is so familiar, our bodies being mostly composed of it. A forgotten coast could be a distant recollection of our true home, just beyond the unknown sea.

The pastel is applied by first crumbling it onto the paper in small amounts, and then smoothing it across the surface by hand. The mountain area is made using a dip pen with a fine nib, or mechanical pencil.