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Thunderstorms can be unpredictable. They rise upward with one heaving bulge after another until they spread into a stratospheric anvil top. They block the way of an aircraft with deep purple curtains, or even worse, with green walls that crackle and glow with lightning. Sometimes an F-14 Tomcat like this one follows holes and corridors past the storm’s lurking dragons and into a strange, quiet cathedral of cloud. Here shafts of sunlight find gaps and flood through with rich golden colors as though they’d struck stained glass windows. The cumulus seems almost welcoming here, soft and bright. There’s a patch of blue sky above, so this is part of the world, even though it looks like dream country.
“This quiet awesome place surrounded by great power is God’s throne room,” says the artist, “where pilots and artists sometimes come to pay their respects.”
Originally published as part of the Collector’s Edition of the book "The Glory of Flight," this Fine Art Anniversary Edition is a giclée on canvas with stunning fidelity to the original painting.
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Phillips grew up loving art but never thought he could make it his
livelihood. At college he majored in criminology and had been accepted into
law school when four of his paintings were sold at an airport restaurant.
That was all the incentive he needed to begin his work as a fine art painter.
Bill Phillips is now a renowned aviation artist and the landscape artist of
choice for many collectors. Bill's strengths as a landscape painter, a
respect and reverence for a time and place, help him when painting aviation as
well as classic landscapes. Phillips often spends days observing landscape
subjects. Finding companionship with the land, he is able to convey the
boundlessness of nature on the painted canvas inspiring a reverence for the
natural landscape in its beholders.
After one of his paintings was presented to King Hussein of Jordan, Phillips
was commissioned by the Royal Jordanian Air Force. He developed sixteen major
paintings, many of which now hang in the Royal Jordanian Air Force Museum in
Amman. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum presented
a one-man show of Phillips’ work in 1986. He is one of only a few artists to
have been so honored.
In 1988, Phillips was chosen to be a U.S. Navy combat artist. For his
outstanding work, the artist was awarded the Navy’s Meritorious Public Service
Award and the Air Force Sergeants Association’s Americanism Medal. At the
prestigious annual fund raiser for the National Park Service, Bill’s work has
been included in the Top 100 each year he has entered the competition and his
work has won the Art History Award twice.
Phillips was selected as the Fall 2004 Artist in Residence at the
North Rim of the Grand Canyon and tapped by the U.S. Postal Service to paint
the stamp illustrations and header design for a pane of twenty stamps in 1997
entitled Classic American Aircraft. He was chosen again in 2005 for a pane of
twenty stamps (ten designs) entitled American Advances in Aviation.
Bill’s major collection of aviation art, Into the Sunlit Splendor, was
published by The Greenwich Workshop Press in 2005.
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