Two Stories: The Surprising Return of the Unrepressed

On this gray April morning, I figured I’d link my blog to Julie Davis’s Phillyist December interview with me. Lo and behold, Phillyist is no more! The interview could not be accessed! My web presence is shrunken, oh my!  Then I took a deep breath followed by an alternate electronic route and found the iview through its own personal link:

http://phillyist.com/2010/12/15/artist_carol_philips.php.

Given what seems to be its ephemeral nature, thought I’d include some highlights here:

Tell us more about this "mystical feeling" that you convey with your art.
[It's] my sense of reality, a reality that involves change, ambiguity, and mystery.

As someone who has had a very full and accomplished career, what advice can you offer emerging artists?
For life: When I was in my early twenties, my grandma told me "grab it while you're young." I'm still doing that.
For art: The advice that I now give to students [is to] be thankful for what appear to be mistakes. They're gifts that open doors to the unanticipated.

I also told Julie that as a child, I "colored really really, really hard which led to regularly breaking magenta, midnight blue, and gold crayons." A couple of weeks ago, I was cleaning out my mother’s house for her move to assisted living. Having despaired of finding childhood drawings (since the oeuvre had been stored in an increasingly moldy basement, the contents of which had been carted away) I was surprised to an ancient manila envelope stuffed with that yellow elementary school drawing paper. Among the contents was a piece awash in, yes, heavily saturated gold trophies and magenta and indigo hearts for the “best Daddy in the world.”