American premiere of Irma, produced by NCSU Centre Stage at Stewart Theatre of the University of North Carolina in Raleigh with Tom Phillips playing the part of The Narrator. Less is More: The Politics of Erasure exhibition at Simon Fraser University Gallery, N. Vancouver, Canada. Reviewed Capilano Review No. 3.7 Winter. This issue uses Tom Phillips's A Humument as the prototype technique for erasure in poetry. Ariana Kelly and Bill Jeffries provide an introductory essay about Phillips and the works in the exhibition Large display of works from A Humument at the Keiller Library, National Gallery of Scotland. Opening night event, on 6th October at Hawthornden Theatre, Tom Phillips in conversation with Graham Rawle A series of themed books of materials from Tom Phillips postcard archive is published by the Bodleian Library, each one bearing A Humument fragment on the cover

In 1989, he became only the second artist to have a retrospective of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Fifteen years later, at the same gallery, he curated an exhibition of his large collection of postcard photographic portraits from the early part of the last century, under the title We Are The People. This passion for collecting, classifying and curating also found expression in his book The Postcard Century, which portrays the history of each year from 1900-1999 through a collage of these vernacular images. The postcard collection also yielded the publication of a series of six themed selections, each curated by Phillips. Academic paper Deconstructing the Novel: The Critical Function of the Artist's Book by Kyle Schwartzlender, pub University of Oregon, 2nd December In an interview in the Guardian the following year, he said: “I could have imagined doing a third, but that would have taken another 25. So I’d be a dribbling 105-year-old, or more likely dead, before I finished it. It was time to stop.” The exhibition Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book, co-curated by Rowan Watson and Elena Foster, is on display at the V&A South Kensington from 15 April — 29 June Thus classical mythology joins medieval poetry together with an early 19th-century Spanish painting, a Victorian novel and a 20th-century American film, linking late modern architecture to a 21st-century disaster.

TP: One thing never quite explained is that the art element, so to speak, is both provoked and conditioned by the words and what joins them, which has its own visual energy and — because I almost always link by following the rivers in the type — is a kind of scaffolding. Sometimes itself being the drawing.

KR: You’ve written that the goal of the work is to replace itself completely, and that in a cycle of six editions you will have achieved this. Is this still the plan? What’s the sixth edition looking like? Tom Phillips was genuinely learned in the best sense," Norman Rosenthal, a long-time Royal Academy colleague, said following Phillips's death. "He was a true polymath deeply versed in literature, music, and most of all of course in visual art and its practice through his own very personal touch. But also the most witty of individuals, aware of the ironic failings of all three of these endlessly wide worlds of culture, which yet he simultaneously always cherished and loved." Fragments from A Humument are incorporated into a commissioned poster designed by Tom Phillips to announce the opening of the National Theatre, London. TP: The cover picture serves to identify one edition from another. The most recent echoes the first and says that I am still forging on. The cover as it appears on the iPhone/iPad app is the best, taking advantage of a changing image. I sometimes imagine the whole book like that were there but world enough and time. AMM, pioneering interpreters of open-score ensemble music, give a London performance of Irma at the Serpentine GalleryTreatment and Transformation: Tom Phillips's A Humument. Thesis by Elizabeth Elsas. Pub. Harvard University

A Humument became a touchstone of Phillips's oeuvre. The Royal Academy’s 2015 Summer Exhibition dedicated a full room to it. Quotations from A Humument populate his other paintings, works of art criticism, and some of the songs he wrote when returning to music in the 1990s. Irma, a central character and the muse of A Humument, gave her name to an opera – conceived in 1969, recorded in 1977 and 1988, with its full score published in 2015. A new production directed by Netia Jones premièred at the South London Gallery in September 2017.

Humument Slideshow 1-50

How to draw characters, just do what he does on 103, 110, 166, 273, 324, 344, 346, 347, or at 355, 361. It’s amazing, beautiful, and simple.