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.