HOWARD PHIPPS  RWA ARE SWE

Howard Phipps is a painter and printmaker with a special interest in wood engraving, a medium in which he is acknowledged as a leading exponent. In recent years his work has been acquired by several prominent institutions, such as the Ashmolean Museum,             Oxford, The British Museum, & the Yale Centre for British Art in the USA. His work is also in Salisbury Museum, The Russell-Cotes Museum, Dorset County Museum and Heilongjiang Museum of Art, China.

Howard has lived near Salisbury since 1980 and his art is rooted in the downs of Wiltshire and Dorset, with their deep coombes and Beech clumps. He works from drawings and watercolours made on location, using light to reveal the underlying sculpture of the landscape. Ancient trackways and striking hill forms draw his eye – timeless places on which earlier generations have left their mark. His subsequent wood engravings are profoundly imbued with a sense of place.

Howard Phipps has had numerous solo exhibitions in London and the South of England, including twice at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, and three times at the Dorset County Museum. Howard’s solo exhibition, Cutting It Fine, at Salisbury Museum in 2021-22 was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row arts programme. He has been a frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions since 1985, where he has also been a recipient of the Christies Contemporary Print Award. He won prizes on several occasions at the National Print Exhibition in the Mall Galleries and in 2017 was awarded the Bewick Society Prize.

Howard Phipps is an associate of the Royal Society of Painter Printmakers (ARE), a Royal West of England Academician (RWA), and a member of the Society of Wood Engravers (SWE)

He was taught to engrave wood while still at school.  He studied art at Gloucestershire College of Art, Cheltenham, followed by a Post Graduate year at the University of Sussex. 

He has a special interest in wood engraving, a method of relief printmaking where the polished surface of a block of end grain Boxwood is engraved using traditional tools with names such as scorper, spitsticker and tint tool. On completion Howard inks the surface, using a roller, and  takes an impression on paper using his Albion hand press, dated 1862.