In 1976, in his third year at Leeds Art College, he entered a competition in Manchester with the works, "let me out number one". This was an example which set the theme and style for his oeuvre for the next few years.
In 1977, he was lucky to be selected to attend the Royal College of Art, in London. At this phase in his life his whole 'ethos' was to get to London by whatever means, and eventually studied printmaking at the RCA, something that he had never done before, but because the course was available at the RCA he was able to engage in a completely new experience for him, through this learning exercise.
The principle of his work at this stage and continues to be what he describes as 'optical conundrums', - a second thought; investigating random things, random events, but with the twist that these random events happened twice.
He has based many series of paintings and sculptures on the ideas of optical conundrums, such as a painting of a window, with multiple panes of glass in an old-fashioned leaded pane style, where the glass of a couple of panes has been broken in exactly the same pattern as that next to it.
Phil was married to illustrator Chloe Cheese for many years, and also continued to play music in a band as a drummer.
"The Monkey Speaks his Mind" was a series of works that was based upon the "March of Progress", - this was a famous drawing which depicts the evolution of man that originally appeared in the U.S. published "Time" magazine, in 1965 entitled "the march of progress".
{Further research; The illustration was commissioned by Time-Life Books for the Early Man volume (1965) of its popular Life Nature Library. This book, authored by anthropologist F. Clark Howell (1925–2007) and the Time-Life editors, included a foldout section of text and images (pages 41–45) entitled "The Road to Homo Sapiens", prominently featuring the sequence of figures drawn by natural history painter and muralist Rudolph Zallinger (1919–1995), [Source, Wikipedia, //https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Progress, accessed 19/02/2016]}.
He has also done other similar series such as "the Venus series"; "the Sphinx series".
He has also tried to explore the ideas of chance, such as in "the dice series".
Whilst lecturing at the Middlesex College of art he turned his attention to the extraction of colour from plants as dyes, known as "Phytochromatography" and as an extension to this he created a piece of works called "the Ink Garden" which was based on a set of CMYK inks as part of his Ph.D. studies that he went on to address. This was based on work from ancient times where plants had been used as various inks and dyes rather than pigments and used the following plants.
- Blue -indigo
- yellow -buckthorn.
- Magenta -madder.
- Black -a mixture between log bark and a small amount of iron.
He was able to recreate these dyes and apply them to a new screen printing process ink.
His ideas often play with words in miss-articulated circumstances, for example, "the Lust of the Mohicans", rather than the original book title "the last of the Mohicans".
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| "Fear Itself", (2011) Phil Shaw. Eight Colour Pigment Based Archival Print on Hahnemuhle Paper 51 x 117cms edition of 45 |
What he is trying to achieve is what he terms as "a smile in the mind".
Other examples might include
- As I laid drying.
- The hatchback of Notre Dame.
- Look black in anger.
- The gland that time forgot.
- Create expectations.
- The Compleat Dangler (one of my favourites!).
He calls all of these "friction/fiction" which are books or paintings of books arranged on bookshelves with similar daft titles.
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