It is lunchtime in Ashland, Oregon, as artist William S. Phillips wipes off a brush to receive a visitor. He has been finishing a painting of three World War II B-29 bombers flying through clouds at sunset. The title is Fifty Miles Out, and the visitor asks the logical question: 50 miles from target or from base?
Bill Phillips grins under his significant mustache, as if prepared for the question and determined to guard a state secret. His smile seems to imply, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.” Instead, he takes the opportunity to make a point.
“One of the nice things about art titles is that they can fill out the story,” Phillips explains. “I like to use short, fairly specific titles for my paintings so the viewer can participate. B-29s at Sunset would be too obvious a title. Fifty Miles Out tells a story. It’s more fun that way.”
Indeed it is, as his home studio proves. The place is stacked with completed and partly completed canvases, model aircraft, publications, and other reference material. In addition, there is the inevitable “I-love-me” wall with framed photos from around the world; aircraft and people as diverse as those of the Oregon Air Guard and the Royal Saudi Arabian Air Force.
Outwardly, there was little in Bill Phillips’s earlier life to indicate he would become in his thirties a professional aviation artist. He has been a prelaw student, an air policeman, and a fireman. But beneath the skin, never far from the surface, lurked an abiding love of aircraft.
Bill, 45, was born in Van Nuys, California, the son of an actor. “One weekend when I was 12, a friend and I slipped away to Van Nuys Airport,” he recalls. They watched California Air National Guard F-86s taking off and landing, and that episode planted a seed that immediately took root. “By the time I got home I was so excited I spent the rest of the weekend trying to sketch what I had seen.”
The young Phillips knew he wanted a closer affiliation with military aviation, and he set out to tour the local armed forces recruiting offices. The Air Force recruiter turned out to be closest to the main entry, “so I never even got to talk to the Navy, though I was always fascinated with naval aviation.” Phillips enlisted in 1963, and his entire basic training class became air policemen. Originally assigned to Minot, North Dakota—a Strategic Air Command missile and B-52 base—he wangled reassignment to Portland Air Base, “which had fighters, F-102s and F-89s, so I bummed rides in everything that came along.”
Eventually Bill wound up at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam, where he spent 1965. “We ran security and ambush patrols, but fortunately we hardly ever made contact with the Viet Cong,” he recalls. But merely living in that environment afforded “a wealth of visual impressions” that he recorded in his sketchbooks. Sadly, the notebooks were lost en route back to the United States, but Bill retains some vivid images that he intends to commit to canvas, including two Skyraiders taking off through a mortar barrage and a flare drop during the monsoon.
Following discharge, Bill entered college with the pragmatic philosophy that he should find a more secure living than art. Consequently, he chose to major in criminology with the intention of entering law school. “But my desire to become an attorney came to an abrupt halt one sunny afternoon in April 1971 when I decided to hang four of my World War I aircraft paintings in the Red Baron Restaurant at the Medford, Oregon, airport. To my sheer delight, before I’d hung the third painting a gentleman sitting in the restaurant asked me if they were for sale, and bought all four for the grand sum of one hundred dollars.”
With that initial success, Bill told his wife, Kristi, that he wanted to try painting professionally. Although apprehensive, she agreed that with two incomes they could help each other over the inevitable rough spots. Kristi worked with the school district and Bill became a fireman, working 24 hours on and 48 off. “A nine-to-five job is murder for an artist,” he observes.
Aside from painting. Bill ventured upon a three-year self-education program that he describes as “Art 101.” “I read and assimilated everything I could on the old masters’ styles and techniques, with special interest in how they manipulated color and light.” He also was drawn to the acknowledged masters of the emerging school of aviation art: Briton Frank Wooton and Americans R. G. Smith and Keith Ferris. Like every young artist in the field, Phillips readily acknowledges the influence of those established experts, but he also mentions Bob McCall, regarded by some as dean of space artists.
Throughout that early period, Bill remained level-headed enough to know that he could not put all his artistic eggs in the aviation basket. He painted western and wildlife subjects as well, selling through an Ashland gallery. Another gallery in Salem, Oregon, picked up his work, and sales increased. But still he hankered to work full-time at aviation. “My break came in 1975 when I was accepted as a member of the Air Force Art Program,” he explains. “I began to move back into the realm of aviation art, and today that is my main focus.”
It was a welcome change, and allowed him to fly to a wide variety of spots around the world—Jordan, Germany, England, and Japan, to name a few. He speaks enthusiastically of the adrenaline high of an air-combat-maneuvering mission between U.S. Air Force F-15s and F-16s, or of a low-level over the Empty Quarter in an Arabian F-5. Such personal exposure to the subject is essential, Bill believes, if an artist is to convey the emotion as well as the fact of high-performance flight.
Naval subjects also are important to Phillips. In 1986 the Navy League contacted him, seeking his assistance in celebrating the 75th anniversary of naval aviation. “That was my foot in the door to the Navy,” explains the Air Force veteran. He was especially pleased to be invited in an official capacity to the Persian Gulf and North Arabian Sea in 1988. He visited ten ships in 30 days and eventually produced six paintings that joined the Navy Combat Art Collection in Washington, D.C. Besides some 1,200 color slides, he also made videotapes and numerous sketches for future reference.
“The thing that really appealed to me about the trip was that the Navy has a genuine combat art program—it’s well named and it put me in harm’s way. I remember standing on the bridge of the USS White Plains [AFS-14] in the Strait of Hormuz when Iranian Boghammers [fast-attack boats] were reported inbound. A frigate and some helos were directed to investigate, and it turned out the boats were some Arab sightseers.” Phillips obviously relishes the prospect of additional sea tours; his main objective is to log a carrier landing in a tactical aircraft.
Asking an artist to name his favorite painting is akin to asking a parent to choose among several children. But Phillips is quick to respond. Thunder in the Canyon and Last Critical Moments seemingly are the diplomatic choices since they depict the Air Force Thunderbirds in the Grand Canyon and an F-14 seconds from “trapping” on board the USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) at dusk. But since those two selections dominate the Phillips’ living room, it’s apparent that the artist isn’t merely being polite.
Bill admits that both paintings are “fantasies.” Most aircraft are prohibited from flying through the Grand Canyon these days, and the Kitty Hawk was witnessed during daylight off San Diego. “I thought it was a terrific scene,” Bill explains, “but I knew it would be even better at sunset, so that’s the way I painted it.”
Other aspects of Navy operations also have appeared on Phillips canvases. Prosecuting the Contact illustrates the varied and complex world of antisubmarine warfare, with the destroyer USS Buchanan (DDG-14) working in conjunction with an S-3A Viking and an SH-3H Sea King helicopter. Despite his Air Force service and continued affiliation, Phillips reckons that his favorite aircraft have tailhooks. He leans toward the F-8 Crusader series and the F9F-6/8 Cougar as the most appealing, but he also calls the A-4 Skyhawk “a pretty little airplane—almost any angle is good.”
In fact. Bill has logged numerous flight hours in some of the aircraft he paints. One of his fondest memories is captured in Heads Up, the view he had from the back seat of a TA-4J, which was published in Approach, the naval aviation safety magazine. In 1987 he spent a month with the Navy Fighter Weapon School, at the height of the movie Top Gun's popularity, and the sight of an F-14A low over the desert became the inspiration for Range Wars. Similarly, Scooter Scores depicts a VF-126 Sky- hawk “fighting” an F/A-18A Hornet. However, Bill points out that not all his Navy paintings are derived from rides in tailhook aircraft. Sierra Hotel, showing a shark-nosed VF-111 Phantom, owes its origin to a 1978 air combat maneuvering flight against F-106s from McChord Air Force Base, Washington. Bill was in the back of a 106 on that occasion.
Regardless of the subject. Bill tries to match the best angle of the aircraft with sun and clouds. The World War II P-47 Thunderbolt, for instance, “can be incredibly ugly.” But history will dictate much of the composition, and two of Phillips’s paintings show “razorback” Thunderbolts from the three-quarter rear position so the rest of the story can be portrayed ahead of the subject aircraft.
In the last dozen or so years, Phillips’s style has evolved into what he considers “more polished, more painterly.” Every painting begins as a skyscape, moving from the abstract toward realism. His sketches begin with darks and lights, telling where the aircraft will go. Although he started with watercolors and moved to acrylics, now he deals almost entirely in oils. “Acrylics lack ‘sculpting’ potential,” he explains, “because they go on flat. I prefer the depth you can achieve with oils.”
Bill is reluctant to characterize himself, but admits that he is not a “rivet counter.” He prefers to depict his aircraft and ships beyond distances at which minute detail is visible—it is this that he considers the main difference between an illustrator and an artist. “I try to produce visual snapshots of flight,” he says, “while keeping the painting as tight as possible at realistic distances. I sort of think of myself as the wingman, who’s part of the painting but outside the perspective.”
Stopping in the hallway outside his studio. Bill points to a three-quarters- completed view of three Boeing F4B-4s over the Kah Pali Na Coast, with a rainbow in the background. “Sometimes I almost become part of the painting,” he admits. “That pilot in the lead airplane, for instance. When I painted that, I thought about what he must have felt. Not just the wind in the wires and the sound of the engine, but what it must have been like to live through the Depression and then have the great good fortune to do that for a living.”
Sitting in his antique barber’s chain Bill Phillips says that his choice of career makes sense. “I could make a lot more money painting western pictures or even people’s pet cats. But when I get to do this”—he rotates the chair to point at the Thunderbirds’ formation over the fire' place—“I have no regrets at all. How many people in this world can honestly say they’re doing exactly what they want to do? Happiness just counts for a whole lot.”
