About his work

Phillip Jacobs studied Fine Art at Wolverhampton University under the artists Knighton Hoskins and Paul Hempton. He went on to gain a Masters degree in Multimedia from Swansea Institute, where he worked on a number of experimental new-media projects.
Phillip has become renowned for producing vibrant paintings of Welsh landscapes and seascapes, and many of his works are clearly inspired by the backdrop of Swansea and its surrounding area.

“The Gower peninsula is an immensely inspirational place for me, as you travel across the landscape you find incredible variation, each pocket of land with its own mythology and history. Gower seems to have all the elements that can fuel an artist’s imagination.”

He mainly uses oil paint to create bold, expressive canvases, rich in colour and texture. These range from the abstract to the semi-representational. His work builds on an intensely personal relationship between the art and the geographical area.

“I try to depict a real place with a poetic, private mythology of my own. A dream can influence me as much as a drawing, the underlying history and geology of a place can be as much of an inspiration as the visible terrain. In my studio I recall my journeys through the landscapes, generating my own narrative along the way, expressing my own interpretation. I like to think of my work existing somewhere between actuality and imagining, between memory and fantasy.”

In one series of images, he paints scenes from ‘where the river meets the sea’, exploring the themes of the cycle of nature and the journey of life. Another series of landscapes he describes as ‘anthropomorphic’- paintings that are between figurative and landscape.

“The environment that I paint juxtaposes the human form with the landscape. For example, I sometimes see the land as female, fecund and reproductive and the sea as a male, penetrating element. The curves of a mountainside can echo the contours of the figure. When I’m working in my studio, I often enter into another world where instinct and imagination take over. When I begin a painting, I have little idea of how it will look in its final form. A painting, I believe, has a life of its own. I let it take me where it wants to go. It’s this discovery that captivates me the most”

His most recent paintings mark a departure from rural scenes to depict more urban environments. They explore the theme of the city in all its forms, from the slopes of Mount Pleasant in Swansea to the geometric blocks of New York City’s Manhattan. Whilst the physical stimuli for Phillip’s work are therefore widely variable, all his paintings are imbued with deep-felt and personal reactions to the material surroundings in which he finds himself.