Phillip Spinks | Studio 230
Process paintings and printmaking
Phillip Spinks was born in Nurnburg, West Germany in 1972. He has lived throughout the United States and Europe, from the mountainous deserts of the southwest to the Mississippi Gulf Coast and from deep in the Bavarian forests to Colonial New England. He studied engineering, creative writing, and archaeology at Boston University.
Spinks has been a painter and printmaker living and working in Boston for over 20 years. His current body of work, Recovering Memories and Recreating Histories, is about taking what is lost or destroyed and divining new meanings as well as anchoring what remains.
On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina struck both New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf coast. His parents’ and his grandmother’s homes were gutted by the storm surge of Katrina. Anything below three and a half feet was buried in sediment and debris. Ninety percent of his family photographs were completely destroyed. As he and his parents sifted through what was left of their home they found items of their recent past. Broken china, splintered chairs, clothing and images lost in frames, melted by the ravages of the storm. What remained were fragments of memories, a face here, an arm draped over a shoulder, the edge of a building.
After smell, sight is the strongest sense linked to memory. Looking through photo albums and frames the images both lost their meaning and sparked moments in times remembered. He saw the austere beauty in the imagery that remained, and as opposed to allowing the loss of the images to create a void in his mind, he chose to reclaim these memories and create a new vehicle to contain them.