Oh Well

Tom Phillips at 50, on page 50

I was saddened to learn that the artist Tom Phillips died this week. He was 85. I suppose I'm now at the age when our heroes and mentors – who are generally a decade or two older than us, rather than our actual contemporaries – will start dying off with appalling regularity, and all too often with the words "after a short / long illness" attached, rather than "tragically young". I won't rehearse Tom's life and achievements: there are obituaries here and here. What matters, of course, and what you want to read about is what role he played in my life!

I'm joking, of course, but there is a serious side to that, too. The purpose of a successful artist of any sort, especially in these media-dominated times, is twofold. First, obviously, they make the work that you absorb and make use of in your own life: the pictures you choose to hang on your walls, the books you have read and keep on your shelves, the music you return to in your particular moods. But, second, they also (whether they like it or not) become public figures whose lives and deeds also belong to us, at least in some caricatured version that suits our purposes, not theirs. Artists may despise biographies, and seek to circumvent them by covering their tracks, but we demand that their lives be served up in a few hundred pages – not necessarily whole, just the juicier bits will do – and what we want someone will find a way to provide.

The cleverer artists and entertainers create a public persona – a sellable brand – that they can comfortably hide behind and live within, dangerous as that is. Think of Keith Richards, for example, as an extreme case, or even David Hockney. Who knows what either of them is "really" like in private company? Nonetheless, it seems that the ultimate price you pay for full-on fame, for want of a better word, can be to lose all control over and ownership of your own life, permanently distorted by the myth like the famous mask that cannot be removed, either because it has become permanently stuck, or in order to conceal the disfigured reality beneath. At the very least you won't be able to walk down the street without someone bothering you for a selfie, complete strangers behaving as if they owned you (which, having sold yourself in the public marketplace, they sort of do, like shareholders); which is not to mention the crazies and stalkers who can turn the life of even quite minor celebrities upside down. I suppose, in a way, we are all potential stalkers of the artists and performers we have invested in, especially now so many have made themselves vulnerable to hostile takeover by playing the social media market.

Tom Phillips was not that sort of famous, obviously: I doubt he had any problems shopping in Tesco, even in the streets of Peckham where he and other locally-based artists like Antony Gormley had designed benches, bollards and streetlamps (can there really be a street called Bellenden Road? Very Tom Phillips...). He seemed like a kind man, and I imagine he'd probably have been happy occasionally to be recognised and asked to pose with any passing admirers. I will now always regret not following up my invitation to the 2017 "varnishing day" at the Royal Academy, where I could have introduced myself (we had exchanged emails and blog comments for a while) and, yes, bothered him for a selfie: I was (am) a fan. In a modest way I have also been a collector of his work. I had a completist phase with regard to his books, not least the amazing Humument in its various editions, but I also picked up a few prints whenever they appeared on eBay – I was often the only bidder – and even scored a couple gratis from the man himself, one a prize for inadvertently first-footing his new blog back in January 2007.

Oh, and I see Christine McVie has also died this week, aged 79? That's sad, too, but I have no real personal investment in her story. I was a fan of the original Fleetwood Mac with Peter Green – the series of hits they had from 1968 to 1970 were a large part of the soundtrack of my teenage years, and I recall buying "Green Manalishi" for my then girlfriend's birthday (an odd choice now I come to think of it) – but I am perhaps the only person remaining in the world not to have bought, or even listened to the album "Rumours". The funny thing is, I only realised after reading her obituary that she is/was Christine Perfect of Chicken Shack. Duh! "I'd Rather Go Blind" was another one of those teenage soundtrack songs. I always wondered what happened to her. Oh, Well.

A Humument, page 27