For almost half his life, Tom Phillips has been illustrating A Humument, a Victorian novel, which he charged himself with illustrating each and every page. A project he started in 1966, Phillips completed his project in 2006, covering the pages with a range of drawings, paintings, and collage.
The Telegraph sums up his decades of work best of all, referring to it as “an extraordinary blend of art, found poetry and sabotage; no book has ever been more beautifully defaced.”
Phillips’ latest project finds him responsible for illustrating a new edition of Tristram Shandy for the Folio Society, particularly surprising when he notes: “I don’t like illustrated books, I’ve not liked them since I was a child.”
Given Phillips’ more surrealist inclination, there is no better illustrator for Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a novel renowned for its absolute absurdity. One page is entirely black, the other marbled, and one leaves space for the reader to draw a picture of Widow Wadman – “as like your mistress as you can – as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you”.
Phillips remarks that: “It’s never been out-absurded. I felt like I had to compete with it.”
When he commenced working on the project, there were aspects which remained clear to him, refusing to show the book’s characters. Phillips decided instead to play with concepts already existing within the novel, with some illustrations appropriating tropes already well-worn, including Magritte’s Ceci N’est Pas Une Pipe.
Phillips found the project particularly freeing. He concludes: “It can be absurd or ridiculous – or beautiful.”
