Richard Phillips: Best Picture: On view at 1301 First Street, Napa
Best Picture presents the US premiere of twelve drawings Richard Phillips made in 2024 for the inaugural TheWrapBook: The Art of Cinema 2024. Conceived for film-industry insiders and readers across the arts, the publication commissioned leading contemporary artists to portray actors and filmmakers. A selection of Phillips’s drawings appeared in its “Artists by Artists” feature, accompanied by an essay by art writer Kat Herriman.
The series brings together one actor and one actress from each of six films recognized during the 2024 awards season: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Maestro, Killers of the Flower Moon, Priscilla, and Past Lives. Based on photographs, the portraits depict the co-stars as public figures rather than as the characters they play.
Best Picture revisits subject matter from Phillips’s earlier series, Most Wanted, which began with five pastel portraits of male celebrities commissioned by VMAN. Phillips subsequently expanded the project into ten oil paintings, adding five female celebrities. Nearly eight feet high, the canvases place the stars against luxury-brand logos, with multicolored halos recalling Richard Bernstein’s illustrations for Interview magazine. White Cube Hoxton Square exhibited the series in London in 2011.
Best Picture returns to celebrity portraiture on the intimate scale of drawings. Pastel gradients and streaks of color that evoke clouds and sunset skies replace the luxury-brand backdrops of Most Wanted. The absence of logos shifts attention toward the individual, while the luminous backgrounds can lend the faces an almost celestial quality. Phillips draws the faces in charcoal and chalk, leaving visible in every portrait the grid he uses to transfer the source photograph and establish its proportions.
