Phillips’ gestural work explores perception and embodiment through the materiality of color, aiming to immerse viewers in a corporeal experience. He sees himself as a facilitator, collaborating with tools and materials to create paintings that transcend mere objects or images and transform into conduits for shared sensory experiences. Unlike conventional easel painting, he prefers a horizontal orientation, which enhances physical engagement and allows for greater viscosity. Repetition and layering of swirling gestures evoke the presence of his body and invite a vicarious bodily response in the viewer. Phillips also addresses gendered biases in contemporary painting, where gestural techniques have often been associated with masculinity while colour is viewed as a feminine attribute. He explores new ideas about gesture and colour, promoting non-binary definitions and expanding the conversation around these concepts. Through his art, Phillips aims to challenge traditional notions and create imagery that resonates with diverse experiences and identities.

MEDIUM(S)

oil on canvas over wood panel

ARTIST BIO

Leon Phillips, born in 1964 in Spalding, Canada, is a contemporary painter currently based in Vancouver, Canada. Phillips employs the materiality of colour to evoke a visceral response in viewers, infusing colour with structural significance rather than mere decoration. Phillips’ work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at venues such as the Yukon Arts Centre in Whitehorse, Canada, and the Amelia Douglas Gallery in New Westminster, Canada. His work is included in collections that include the Canadian Consulate General in Chicago, IL, USA, and the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia. He has participated in artistic programs and residencies such as the International Painting Symposium at the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre in Daugavpils, Latvia and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Banff, Canada. Through his innovative approach to colour and form, Phillips pushes the boundaries of contemporary painting.

What’s in a Whirl?

by Kevin Griffin

The gestures turn to the right, they turn to the left, they go up, they go down. They seem to be constantly moving. The first time you see one of Leon Phillips’ Whirl paintings, they can be overwhelming. They can feel like coming face to face with chaos.

But if you keep looking, it doesn’t take long before the paintings change. It’s not as if the gestures settle down. It’s more that patterns start to emerge. The gestures no longer look like utterly wild, uncontrolled movement. They look intentional. They look like they’re part of a bigger structure.

Whirl no. 8 | oil on canvas over wood panel | 48 x 36” | 2025

Take Whirl 8, for example. If you look at the top right section of the painting, there is a bright pink gesture that starts about halfway up the canvas. As it heads upwards, it gently bends inward to the centre and then outward to the top corner where it makes the first of several dramatic directional changes – I count six in all – before returning to its starting point and a final turn inward. This pink gesture form is one of three across the top (in order, from right to left, pink, electric blue, minty green) and three on the bottom (left to right, teal, minty green again, and also teal again). Most of the beginnings and endings of the top layer of gesture forms take a journey over the surface before closing the loop and returning back home or close to home. They record the time it took to go from start to finish.

The gestures move the way they do for several reasons. Complete gesture forms enclose interior spaces that recall the sides of the canvas: they’re mini paintings within the painting. In Whirl 7, the top left yellow gesture highlights earlier gestures in teal, red, pink, yellow, and orange. By overlapping the way they do, they create a sense of depth. Sometimes, the enclosing gesture captures a geometric patch of white, a remnant of the original primed canvas. When that happens, the white functions as an absence that refers to an origin time before gestures began. The highlighted fragment gestures don’t change all that much. Despite the passage of time and repeated iterations, they continue to follow patterns that are only slightly different.

Whirl no. 7 | oil on canvas over wood panel | 48 x 36” | 2025

The gestures look the way they do for a practical reason. They’re a record of what the paint brush can do. Each gesture starts with a brush fully loaded with paint. Almost immediately, as the gesture moves over the surface, the intensity diminishes as it turns into striations that sometimes are thin enough to reveal an earlier colour from a layer below. Sometimes they mix with an earlier mark to create a new, unexpected colour. Each gesture is the width of the brush. Each gesture ends when the brush runs out of paint. It’s not that Phillips imposes his will on the brush and paint. It’s more that he works with them to see what they can do. Gestures respond to one another as Phillips responds to the brush and the colours he lays down on the canvas. He references American painter Hans Hoffmann and describes what he does as a call and response process.

Sometimes, the gestures look as if they’re coming off the canvas into our world. Whirl 1 is packed with at four gestural elements that recall the illusions of Roger Penrose’s impossible geometric figures. The orange gesture form in the lower left folds back on itself in its final turn before it runs out of paint. In addition to the internal space it encloses, the gesture’s final turn upward creates a sense of space by foreshortening. In closing the loop, the gesture creates something impossible: a three-dimensional shape on a two-dimensional surface. It can’t be true but it is.

Whirl no. 1 | oil on canvas over wood panel | 30 x 24” | 2025

The gestures in all the Whirl paintings don’t play by the usual rules. The gestures don’t lie flat, they don’t stop moving and they don’t behave themselves. They’re unruly and playful. While it’s true that they’re made by the artist’s hand and body, they’re not emotive. They move the way they do because they follow their own internal logic.

By being themselves, the gestures can’t help but clash with art critic Clement Greenberg’s influential belief that painting is essentially a two-dimensional medium. Modernist abstract painting, he claimed, should always strive to become as flat as possible and eliminate any hint of illusionistic depth. Many of the gestures in Phillips’ paintings are indeed flat but not all of them. Some are simultaneously flat and not flat. They follow in Greenberg’s wake but take off into new territory.

The paintings in the Whirl series are traditionally called abstract because they don’t depict a recognizable landscape or figure. Despite how art history might classify them, I see them differently. I see them as very specific. I see them as paint on a surface formed into patterns and shapes that trigger associations in me. When I look at Whirl 7, I feel like I’m in an intensely crowded public space such as a train station or airport terminal. I often have an initial feeling of anxiety in those spaces because everything appears to be moving so fast. It doesn’t take long before I figure how everyone is moving. I learn to recognize the order in disorder. Once that happens, I merge with the flow and become one of many. At other times, the individual gestures remind me of my life and how I’ve had to pivot and adapt to change. They make me think of having no choice but to learn a new software program at work, wondering how long I should spend outside and breathe polluted air because of the smoke from forest fires and having to choose which American goods to buy and which to avoid because of Donald Trump. They make me feel like the contemporary world: there’s lots of movement but little progress.

Whirl by Leon Phillips is at THIS Gallery, Friday, Oct 10 to Saturday, Oct, 19, 2025.

Leon Phillips on the paintings in Whirl

How do you make a gesture?

While I’m painting I work flat and I’m always moving around the painting. I’m sometimes standing at one end and sometimes I’m standing at the other end. I’m constantly moving around. My moving is like a pinwheel with the painting at the centre. I’m constantly spiraling around. I’m trying to see it from different angles.

It’s a call and response. So I can see, ‘Oh there’s some pink over here coming up from below and I need to pull that to the top there so I’ll go over there and I’ll make a gesture to pull the pink up. I’m moving around, moving around.’

The start of the gestures correspond to a need for placing it horizontally or vertically. Sometimes I need a stronger edge on the shorter side of the canvas and sometimes it seems to me that I need it on the long edge of the canvas. Then I put it down and I see how it looks. Where do I need to make my next move? What colour does it have to be? Does it have to be a cool tone or warm tone?

Why does the pink gesture in Whirl 6 (upper left) end where it ends?

I’ll make a gesture and I’ll often look at the painting for quite a long time before I decide to make my next move. So for example, there with that pink gesture, I really liked that blue and that orange from below and I didn’t want to cancel that out because it was kind of a nice knot of energy. I was probably going, ‘Okay, I need a solid pink there. It’s got to bump up against the edges. I don’t want to block out those blues so I have to overlap it a bit. I have to turn my brush.’ I didn’t want to block off that beautiful solid pink there so I just wanted to close it up without destroying it.

I’ll look and look and look and figure out, ‘Okay, how do I make this gesture?’ and then I just go for it. Then it’s largely intuitive and sometimes it changes while I’m making the gesture. What I had planned to be changes as I drag my paint through the layer. So it’s total madness.

This pink gesture at the bottom of Whirl 6 –  I did not plan it to do that whoosh. But when I loaded my brush and started to do it, I realized, ‘Oh my gosh! I‘ve got to do that so I don’t cancel all of that great stuff in the centre.’ That created this micro composition which I’m trying to go for. It’s a careful balancing act of addition and subtraction because every time I’m adding, I’m subtracting.

I plan and I plan and then once I make the gesture, it can change. It’s all nuts. It’s extremely stressful.

Does a gesture reflect the amount of paint on the brush at the start and end?

Those complete gestures are determined by the maximum amount of paint load that that width of brush will hold. The brush is telling me what it can do. I have to listen to the brush and the paint.

It’s how I’m moving my body and my arm. Sometimes the brush is more on its edge and more on its face and sometimes I have to turn it so I don’t cancel out too much from below. I also don’t want them to look too mechanical. The brush does wonderful things. These brushes have a spring and a bounce and a life so I’m feeling what it can do while I’m moving – what you call the lifeline of the gesture. I like that. They do have a birth and they do die. You’re right.

Clement Greenberg, the influential New York art critic, cast a long shadow over modernist abstract painting and claimed, among other things, that paintings are two-dimensional, should strive toward flatness and avoid any illusionary depth. What do you think about Greenberg’s ideas?

My paintings refuse to be flat. I think Greenberg would really hate them.

I can’t tell you why I started flipping the brush. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t plan it that way. It’s just how I’m seeing what happening as I’m moving the brush. To me, those gestures have dimension. They almost threaten to come out into our world and break free of the pictorial space and surface. They’re not flat and they’re not adhering to those rules about the flatness of the canvas that is sacrosanct and can’t be violated.

I was taught by people who were Greenbergian. I’m always having to come up against those rules and regulations. They’re deeply engrained in me. I was raised in the church of Greenberg.

Sometimes these gestures make me very uncomfortable. I can’t make them flat. They want to be something else. It’s like riding a wild horse.

How do you make sure you don’t make tasteful decisions?

I have to push the gestures beyond that point where they feel or look safe and that often means introducing gestures that produce darker results.

Sometimes I’ll lay down a blue or green gesture and then I realize, a red one has to go on top of that to bring it to life. So this scarlet in Whirl 1 gets dragged over that blue and it resulted in that incredible colour. It produces a gesture that’s chromatically non-binary: it’s red and green all at once. And I love that because it has the two contrasting colours in one gesture. It had this bruised deep dark colour which it needed because everything else was fairly bright and blingy. I think the last gesture I made was this orange and that dragged over the green and produced that same kind of bruised gesture that’s orange and green at the same time. And then it was, ‘Oh, I like those darker elements. They looked brooding to me.’

What does that mean? Good taste. I don’t know.

I think they’re good when they look a little threatening. Some of these paintings really scare me. I have a hard time being around them.

You said Whirl 7 scares you more than the others. Why is that?

There seems to be more push and pull of the gestures against each other. There’s more jostling for power. The larger canvas allows me to get my body into the gesture more. Maybe they’re a bit more energetic or something. I started working with more reds and yellows on the top layers, I think those really project and almost threaten. To me they spill out into our space. They’re inhabiting our world. The reds are really almost violent. It looks a bit mad to me.

Leon Phillips was in conversation with Kevin Griffin. The interview has been edited and condensed.

The interview was conducted for the exhibition Whirl at This Gallery, Oct. 10 to 19, 2025.