Philip Manton Willey

I was born in Winchester UK 1941. I went to Grammar School in Reigate, Surrey and Hornsey College of Art in London.
I always liked painting. When I first got interested in art it was because of painters like Picasso, Matisse and Gauguin, but in English art schools at the time, late Fifties, they were considered old fashioned. I think David Hockney was about the only person still painting. Everybody else was coming up with concepts or making political statements. I designed a few posters and got involved with a gallery called Indica which became famous as the place where John Lennon met Yoko Ono.
I moved to Canada in 1973 via New York. In Nova Scotia I was busy making a living and didn’t have much to do with art though I did get to know Alex Colville and he encouraged me to do some painting. I tried painting like Colville for a while but I found it too restrictive.
After I moved to BC in 1978 my paintings got more expressionistic. I lived in Ucluelet before moving to Victoria. I was on the board of Open Space when there was a revolution. I don’t know to what extent I was a factor in it. Everybody has their own version of what happened. That experience turned me off public involvement for a while.
I’ve always been torn between classical and modern styles. I’m not sure I’ve ever developed a distinctive style of my own. It’s art itself that interests me. Trying to figure out what it is. People like Warhol, Schnabel and Koons fascinate me but I don’t have the personality to be that kind of artist and I find New York overpowering. Same with Hirst and Emin…..I understand they are at the cutting edge but I still come back to painting, making marks on paper…. Cy Twombly has that market cornered.
I'm not sure how effective political art is these days. It seems to me the public has become unshockable. I’m impressed by what Banksy does but it's really just another form of entertainment. A highly lucrative one. I don't see him starting any revolutions.
Lately I’ve been working on some novels. One set in Israel, one in Bangkok and one about London in the Sixties. I’ve also started to look more closely at this place where I find myself, Victoria B.C. I’m working with old photographs and various modern elements. The idea is to come up with a kind of fusion of Victoria’s past and present. I'm interested in the colonization of Vancouver Island. The point where two cultures collided. Many things have happened here in the last 200 years. History is an ongoing process and I’m trying to isolate a few random moments.
I have shown my work in numerous galleries including St. Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, Acadia University, Wolfville, NS, Bau-Xi Gallery, Vancouver, North Park Gallery, Victoria, Open Space, Victoria, Swan’s, Victoria and Pelican Gallery, Bridgetown, Barbados. I have also written articles and reviews for various publications including Random Thought, Vanguard, Issue, ETC Montreal, Monday Magazine, Boulevard and La Rosa.

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