Much of my art deals with the subject of man's inhumanity to man. My artistic aspirations are to heighten the viewers awareness of what has happened and what is happening to the human condition today as well as to raise pertinent questions and, ideally, to evoke an emotional and thought-provoking response. Admittedly, there are some scenes that may confront the psyche as shocking at first, but my hope is that upon closer examination and after further contemplation, these pieces will reveal themselves in the positive way in which they are intended.

I believe that everyone has the capacity to respond to art, although that capacity is not always activated. To truly respond to a work of art, it is necessary first of all to suspend all labels and prejudices and not to lock yourself inside the walls of your own ego. Be open to what the work has to offer you and let the work speak to you without setting up preconditions, without in any way defending the fragility of your own ego. True works of art sometimes teach us things about ourselves we have no desire to know. Art can take you into another's vision only to bring you back to your own truth.

This is not an easy task because our eyes are not innocent. Try to see as a child sees. A child sees innocently. A child sees what's there. A child doesn't see with labels and prejudices because it doesn't know about them. This is not to say that we should respond as a child responds. The act of seeing comes first, followed by the act of response. A child does not have the capacity to respond with great depth, but, as adults, we do. So try to get the look of the child who sees what's there, coupled with the response of an adult who sees from the great depths of experience.

Understanding often comes with looking, and waiting, and looking again. A true work of art that is created from the depths of one's soul, is on rare occasions easily understood just at a glance. Art can offer up tremendous joy, and it can increase our capacity to accept darkness and pain. Ideally, it can make us more sensitive and more alert. Because art is demanding of your attention, it can help you become a more attentive person.

In my humble opinion, the greatest and most spiritual art movement of the twentieth century came along with the surrealists. Artists like Dali, Magritte, Duchamp, Schwitters, Man Ray, and many others began to explore art from a truly unique perspective. They began to view the world from the outside looking in rather than from the inside looking out. Basically, they began to render visible thought. They opened up strange new worlds of art that coincided with the tenets of such great thinkers as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. In the world of the surrealist, an artist can change reality. Surrealists conjure up a logic that contradicts the laws of common perception.

The surrealists were painters of ideas, of visible thoughts, rather than of subjects. They began to reveal the hidden nature of man rather than the visible world around him. Most of their work was associated with dreams and the subconscious, rather than the physical world. In the surrealist manifesto, Andre Breton stated that the goal of the surrealists was to reunite the conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in "an absolute reality, a surreality." Drawing heavily on theories adapted from Sigmund Freud, Breton saw the unconscious as the wellspring of the imagination. He defined genius in terms of accessibility to this normally untapped realm, which, he believed, could be attained by poets and painters alike.

Critics have sometimes described my work as a kind of social surrealism and I have no qualms with this description. I make no attempt at persuading anyone to think as I think, I merely comment on the world as I see it, and if my personal truths happen to coincide with those personal truths of the viewer, then on some mystical plane, at some inexplicable level, I believe we both benefit.

I consider my art to be conceptual as opposed to literal or abstract. Much of my work deals with ideas and I often employ symbolism toward that end. My goal is to create an idea that carries with it a force that will strike a familiar chord within the viewer, and perhaps takes them by surprise. I want to take you to a place you've never seen, yet make you feel as though you've been there.

My technique is rather simple, nothing mysterious. I rely heavily on instinct, mostly flying by the seat of my pants. Having no preconceived idea as to what my next piece will be about, I sit with a stack of old magazines, mostly National Geographics and Smithsonians simply because they have the best photographs, and I thumb through them until I find an object or a scene that moves me in some way. I then begin building on that object or that idea in the same fashion, a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle I've never seen fully assembled. I keep this technique up until I feel that a concept is developing-sometimes I'm not sure what the piece is about until I find the last piece of the puzzle.

So partly by choice and partly by chance I arrive at some combination of images that works well together to form an idea. I often work on several pieces at one time, using an X-acto knife to trim the pieces out of the magazines and acid-free rubber cement to assemble them. Once I feel the work is complete, I dry-mount it on acid-free foam board and frame it in a simple frame. I never sign the front of my work because I feel that this becomes a distraction for the viewer. I want them to fully digest what's there with absolutely no hindrance. I also title the pieces on the back because I want to allow the viewer the luxury of forming their own opinion of the work before they know what I think about it.

I use all the concepts of proper design within my compositions; repetition, figure/ground, color theory, scale, chiaroscuro, tonal quality, etc. I want the piece to work first of all on an aesthetic level and secondly on a personal, thought-provoking level. I feel that this is what gives the work its initial power. I often bend the rules of scale and juxtapose unusual objects, but I always try to maintain the proper quality of lighting throughout the piece, including the proper direction of the shadows, soft and hard light, color range, etc. I also try to keep the angles and positions of the objects in each piece in the proper perspective.

I believe that by creating that which never existed, and generally, that which cannot exist, with photographic clarity, I infuse the work with a force that it otherwise would not have. Much of my work is intended to be humorous, but isn't always seen that way at first glance. However, I think upon close examination, one would find a touch of humor in even the darkest of my images.


Excerpt from: Art Review, Flagpole Magazine, 10-4-2000, Volume 4, Number 40

Images As Icons. J. Phillip White is something of a magician. Wielding an X-acto knife instead of a wand, he conjures complex coded illustrations and compelling, powerful photomontage compositions out of not-so-thin air. Reaching into the realm of the photojournalist, the pop icon and the dizzying billions of images used to convey everything we know, White culls photos from hundreds of discarded magazines, dissects them, and then recombines them to create brilliant scenes of cleverly mixed metaphors and mystical significance. By recycling images removed from their original contexts and juxtaposing them like free verse within unexpected realms, against alien skies, the artist creates a plane of altered reality wherein the mind takes intuitive leaps in order to make sense of what the eye sees. These leaps of imagination result in new symbols and new concepts born within us, insights into our own souls and renewed awareness of the world around us.

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