Throwback Thursday: Phil Hale

♦Back in Tripwire Annual 2009, we spoke to illustrator turned fine artist Phil Hale about a career that has included painting Swamp Thing to portraying former British prime minister Tony Blair . Photos and interview by JOEL MEADOWS

Broad Strokes

Phil Hale is not your usual interview subject. He is interested in comics but he hasn’t worked in them for many years and he did quite a lot of work as an illustrator but he has left that behind too, now making his name as a portrait painter and fine artist in the traditional sense. His work is in the permanent collection at the prestigious National Portrait Gallery in London, the House of Commons, Lord’s, and other collections across the UK. We interviewed Phil last back in 2003 in TRIPWIRE, when we published our shortlived monthly incarnation. In fact, his feature was called Studio Space and was a direct inspiration for the book that came out in 2008 of the same name.

Hale is a man who would rather that his work speak for him, so he is a difficult interview subject. When I went to visit him this time around at his current studio off Mare Street in Hackney in London’s East End,

I had forgotten this fact. So I arrived at the studio and he greeted me somewhat diffidently.

We sat down and started chatting, trying to fill in some of the biographical information about what led him to this point. Hale is a tall ex-pat American with a soft Massachusetts accent, an accent that has been softened by over twenty-five years of living in England. He started his professional career as an assistant to artist Rick Berry in Boston and he worked in the same studio as another artist, Tom Canty. In fact, it was his association with Canty that led to his first significant work on a Stephen King book, as he revealed.

“What happened is that I was sharing a studio with Rick Berry and Tom Canty in Boston above a used bookstore. They let me live there in the studio. I was 17, I moved out of my house and I was living there in this loft we built. Absurd. They were all working there and Tom was doing Stephen King books for Grant Books. He was designing them and he was sort of art directing them as well. Stephen King was doing a book, I can’t remember which one, I was 18 years old and somebody dropped out. They had about 10 different illustrators for The Talisman, I guess, and so they let me do it and so I had this job. It was a fluke that I was on this desirable commission, at that age. And King liked the piece. He gave me the entire next book.”

It was the book project in a way that led Hale to the UK because, in his words, “Rick Berry was such a powerful influence that I couldn’t think straight. While he was there I didn’t need to or know how to. So I came over here.”

It was the feeling of being an outsider that he liked, of being a foreigner here and this sense of alienation is something that has always existed in his work.

“So I came over here, I didn’t think I was going to stay, and I did the Stephen King book. He gave me, incredibly, a percentage, and I did so well on that one book that I didn’t have to work for four years. He gave me such a fantastic percentage . . . I don’t think he ever did it again.”

But the King project wasn’t the first professional work he did. In fact, piecing together his slightly rambling answers, it was actually a comic that predated the book project.

“I was apprenticed to Rick Berry and he was going down to New York, looking for book cover work. I was probably sixteen or seventeen and because we were so poor, we used to get the midnight bus down to New York , we couldn’t afford a hotel. I saw Marvel and DC as well. I actually did a spec page for Swamp Thing. And Archie Goodwin at Epic was very kind to me, really, and trusted me a bit. I threw him some terrible ideas that I’m glad we didn’t do. And then, because Epic was winding down, they gave me the issue where I did the cover and something inside, because there was no real risk to them; they already knew it was going to close up shop. What’s surprising about that is that I’m still interested in that character because it’s such a basic, primal, ridiculous confrontation, and I think that primal ridiculous things are often what make art good anyway. And I really love that friction between the low form and the high form, the idea that you could take something bankrupt and do something with it that’s really worthwhile, even though it seems so completely impotent.

The artist has good memories of the late Goodwin, he recalls.

“He was such a nice guy. I think the fact he was such a nice guy probably made his job hard. It’s difficult for me to remember in any kind of realistic way because I was so naïve back then. Everything he did, you couldn’t tell whether he was indulging you, or actually saw something real, whether you had any potential or if it just a kindness,” he admits honestly.

Berry ended up over here while Hale was also living here and he got him intrigued in the idea of doing art by computer, something that was in its infancy at this time.

“But while I was doing the book, Rick Berry had come over to England for half a year. He was very involved with computers and that was just when working with visual files was just starting, pre-Photoshop. He was really obsessed with it and I was interested. You could switch around, pump up, tune in the colours on a piece—now it’s nothing, but back then it was mind-boggling. But I didn’t have to work for four years because of the money from the King book, so that was the end of my illustration career. Instead, I made music and built my own recording studio, back when that was really something.”

It was a period in his life that he seems to look back on with some nostalgia.

“I lived in the countryside and, I painted for myself. I found out what I was interested in again, which I hadn’t done since I was twelve,” he remembers.

But it did have its downside in time, as he tells me.

“And then when I ran out of money which was around 1990 or 1991, nobody would hire me any more, it had been such a big gap. All my connections had faded out. And I had changed my style and realistically, also, I think I probably had a slight air of desperation because I had let it go too long. It’s just never an attractive thing to deal with someone who appears to really really need the work. So I couldn’t get hired. In fact, rather than painting, I did photographic book covers for a little while here in London, because when I was in Stroud in Gloucestershire I had access to all these fantastic darkrooms. I did a lot of semi-experimental poking around. Solarization, bleach on the prints, all sorts of analog ways to break down the image. But that was not really a money making thing.

I struggled for a while, I lived in my studio. My girlfriend and I were going to have a baby, what a classic. So I had to sort myself out and Rick Berry, and a woman called Maria Cabardo at DC, saved me, offered me jobs and I started making some money so I could find a flat to live in. It was pretty urgent, I was pretty motivated. I did the illustration for four or five years, but didn’t really enjoy it. I just felt like I could produce better pieces, and become a better painter if I didn’t have to consider the feelings of the art director. Some people are very good at that but I just couldn’t do it. And I wanted to learn how to develop a piece, to bear down on something for more than a few weeks. Knowing the endpoint of the illustration work was just a killer.It stopped me before I had even started.”

Despite the fact that he wasn’t suited to working in illustration, Hale did work on a regular basis for Playboy, an arrangement that suited him, he admits.

“I kept going with Playboy for a while just because by then I didn’t even have to give them a sketch and they were nice to deal with. It was really funny because I was working with Tom Staebler, and when I used to nick copies of Playboy when I was 12, there he was on the masthead. His name was in there as the art director, so it was strange and familiar talking to him. But he would send me the manuscript, nicely, respectfully and you would say to him ‘What about this?’ And once he’d okayed it, you’d go through it. There was no fuss, and they weren’t paying me that much, so I didn’t have to worry so much about their feelings.”

Working for Playboy was something that he found very useful.

“It meant you could do something relatively quickly and be paid for it and then have some freedom. You’d really make your money from selling the original. And I always worked big; they were always three or four feet high. I wanted to learn how to paint; I couldn’t do that in a square foot. But I found the illustration tough. If you wanted to make something good, you just couldn’t. You have to stay inside the brief. And it’s not even that that’s always a problem, but even when you’re settling down to consider the possibilities, just having that as a filter stops you from pursuing other possibilities that might be perfectly acceptable to the client.”

But he moved from illustration to the world of portraiture, something that he was a much more natural fit for his temperament as an artist, he readily admits to me.

“Portraiture is what I’ve done for eight or nine years now. I painted a doctor—a psychiatrist—and he entered it into the National Portrait Gallery annual competition, and it came third, and suddenly the National Portrait Gallery was taking my work and showing it to people, it was close on having them as an agent.”

It was being shown at the National Portrait Gallery that helped him reinvent himself as a portrait artist.

“I did that one painting and then they asked me to paint the composer Thomas Ades for them, which was a terrific job because he was such a wonderful guy, he gave me a lot of time, which I needed. Then I did work for Lords Cricket Ground, which led to painting Tony Blair for the House of Commons.”

The amazing thing about Hale’s transformation is that he has switched from drawing comic work for Epic Illustrated to painting for Playboy and then being asked to paint someone who was the most powerful person in the country in quite a short space of time. It is a reflection of his talent and tenacity that this has occurred.

He didn’t have the luxury of the former British Prime Minister sitting for him but nonetheless he managed to make it work.

“There were no sittings. It wasn’t possible. There were two or three photo shoots. It was really quite peculiar because I had limited time by portrait standards, but ridiculous access by any other measure.”

I asked him if he ever felt that the artifice of photographing people ever got in the way but he seemed to be quite philosophical about how one would deal with that

“You have to accept that. You minimise it and in fact with this shoot because I had so little time I had to think quite carefully ahead of it. I had to know what kind of lighting there was going to be, that he was going to be sitting down. I needed to know that I wanted some kind of panel behind him. I didn’t want him floating in space. You try and contain it before you get there. That’s a really unusual one because normally you’d have seven or eight sittings and with that there was just nothing.”

The Tony Blair painting is something that he is obviously pleased with as it was designed for a purpose that only a physical portrait could fulfill, as he explained to me.

“It’s an anti-illustration, that one in particular. It’s designed to be seen in person, it’s not designed to be reproduced to a postage stamp, and when I see it reproduced it makes me feel slightly odd, gives me a headache. When I see the repro I feel a little flat about it. When I see the original it’s something different, better. 500 people will ever see the painting itself,” he says openly.

Hale also found himself as part of a clique of fellow artists, thanks to his exposure at the NPG and in the runup to his work on the Blair portrait.

“One of the things that happened off the back of the National Portrait Gallery was . . . there’s a group of 10 significant portrait painters and they’re often not the established ones. not yet. They’re invisible in a funny way. But they are the ones who are emerging, who will eventually become the doddering old men of portraiture. But they’re all smart and likable and talented, skilled in ways that are shocking and quite radical if you come from illustration,” he reveals sounding very animated.

“So they were incredibly helpful, useful, very open as well. I thought they would be competitive and prickly. But they weren’t. I ended up grouped with them and once you’re known and in, the whole scene starts to link up.“

Working on the Blair portrait threw up a lot for the painter.

“The key thing with the Blair portrait was that you could not make it exciting. You could not jump it up with an exciting composition or exciting colour or ask him to do something. Because it’s fake, it’s an interference. It’s a fraud if you do that, and dilutes whatever is actually there. You have to paint exactly what’s in front of you. That’s the purest possible form and you’re denied anything except to reproduce what’s there, and anything else would distort and deform and misrepresent it. But in a way because those standards are so clear and you know when you’re stretching them; it’s clarifying, you are forced to deal with the real problems. You don’t get to load it with sugar and salt.”

He is now well-regarded as a painter, but when he made the switch from illustration to portraiture, it wasn’t an easy process. Traditional painting did seem to have fallen out of favour, I argue, but he seems confident that the pendulum has swung back towards it in recent years.

“It did. It’s back in now for some reason, I don’t know why. Certain elements of craft are coming back in as well. I’m sure it’s cyclical, people are going to tire of it at some point because they’ll be glutted. On a personal level, when I met those portrait painters and saw what they were considering when they painted, what their priorities were, how their approach worked. It was so different from illustration. It worked so well and it gave me a way forward. I had to learn how to paint over again. That was the biggest, most shocking thing and I had to be willing to do lousy paintings for a while, even now, until it became habitual; because you can’t be micro-managing every second of working with the brush, you have to ingrain it as a habit.”

Even though he has embraced the portrait work, he has returned on occasion to his roots. In 2007, he was commissioned by Penguin Books in the UK to come up with new cover images to their series of classic Joseph Conrad novels. From his demeanour, it was a job that he really enjoyed.

“Samantha Johnson at Penguin had the catalog to a show. She gave me a lot of leeway—they didn’t even see rough images or anything before I painted. She gave me complete freedom. I did a couple of images that didn’t go in. I did multiple paintings for some covers. I did three paintings for Nostromo and two for Heart of Darkness. I was able to carry over an approach, a development, from one piece to the next.”

The Conrad images really gave him something to sink his teeth into.

“I did about 10 paintings. I found a fantastic scene in Heart of Darkness which I couldn’t believe hadn’t been done before. This is the scene where Kurtz escapes. He’s been under arrest in a steamer, and he escapes in the middle of the night. And he’s crawling on his hands and knees through the bush to get back to his hut and to the native encampment. It was such a fantastic image and nobody had done it, what a beautiful central image. That was the final cover. I did two versions of it but one was clearly better than the other.”

As with any bigger project, there were some that he was less happy with.

“The ones that were illustrational, like Secret Agent, worked less well. They were more like movie posters. But in the main, it was pretty good.”

He found the fact that he had to do them all in one go advantageous for him as an artist, he admitted.

“To do 10 images at once was much nicer because your consciousness can float around it. You can hit some kind of fluke with one and you realise you can extend that with the next. There were things that I wanted to do that I just couldn’t learn to do quickly enough. I actually wanted quite lurid colours that were then crushed and suppressed, forced down. I was thinking of Edvard Munch a little. But I had to learn how to do it. And it was too involved to work through in the time I had, the final pieces were much more monochromatic.”

It wasn’t hard for him to get back into the habit of painting faster than he would have done with a portrait painting.

“It wasn’t difficult because I had done a show the year before, a gallery show. Also, my natural mode, because I’m not really that patient, is to develop something fast, and have to have the speed of working it up be part of the force, keep it open. I’ve had to learn to refine for the portraiture. Very painful. I prefer doing things fast. In some ways the Conrad pieces were done very quickly but a lot of the thinking and the drafting, the drawings beforehand took quite a while. But the actual painting time was pretty short. By then you should know. I paint many things two or three times because you look at it as as a rehearsal, as a dry run and that’s partially so that when you go to paint it you already know it well enough to knock it in quickly so it has some performance. You don’t want to be fiddling and fussing.”

Even though Hale has no connection to comics anymore in his work these days, they do still influence him. When I arrived at his studio, he told me about a cache of old comics he’d unearthed. These were titles that he hadn’t owned in thirty years and he seemed to find it hard to contain his enthusiasm for comics even now.

“I think it’s still at the center of how I feel about art. I had forgotten how much they meant to me when I was ten. There is something primal and direct about the stuff. It’s true. There’s that dynamism, outwardness and vitality.”

It has a number of attractions for him, as he goes on to elaborate.

“It also has a kind of naïve power. It makes me nervous to say that—it sounds terribly patronising to say. But it has the strength of a naïve artform. Remember, I’m talking about The Demon, not Maus. That’s part of what makes it efficient, strong and direct and unfiltered. I feel more engaged with it again. Jack Kirby!”

Hale has managed to successfully remake himself as a portrait painter and fine artist, as he admits that any association with comics would have been a possible stumbling block.

He is an old-fashioned artist because, although he uses technology for things like photographing his work to send to clients (when I was there, he was about to photograph a poster image he had painted for

Lucca, the Italian comic festival held each October) but he is no lover of technology for its own sake.

“I only like it for the efficiency. But I try to stay away. The older I get the more I see them as a problem, a cheapener. You have to make a commitment to something and I’d rather have the analogue with the problems than the digital with its perfect virtual nothingness. I can’t afford to tangle my mind by trying to work an allegiance to both things.”

We talk about the increased reliance by people on technology and he is refreshingly honest. Perhaps his work has this raw power because he hasn’t embraced the same tools as every other artist currently working and maybe that’s why he sits more comfortably as a portrait artist than as an illustrator.

The idea of nurturing new talent is something that has also crossed his mind as he runs a gallery on Vyner Street, round the corner from his studio, where it’ll be exhibiting work from a cross-section of different artists. Perhaps his encounter with the portraiturists before he painted Blair has made more of an impact on him than he realises.

As we part company, he has warmed a little bit as an interview subject but there is still a distance and a reticence to talk about his work when it can just be shown. In a world where we are overwhelmed by exhibitionists and people desperate to show themselves off, the idea of an artist who would rather leave some mystique and let his work communicate with his audience is very appealing.

JOEL MEADOWS

Phil Hale www.tripwiremagazine.co.uk

www.philhalestudio.com