Interview with Jim Phillips

Jim, for our readers that aren't as familiar with your work, can you please introduce yourself?

My name is Jim Phillips and I've been invited to answer a few questions concerning my lifelong career. I've been a graphic artist in the commercial field starting in 1961 when I submitted an entry in a surf-car cartoon contest in Surfer Quarterly magazine. It was a drawing of an old woody wagon headed for a surfing point break. My woody only garnered honorable mention but they featured it more prominently than the others. I went on to doing cartoons for Surfing Illustrated and other surfing magazines. Since then I have created art for many other interests, including skateboarding, motorcycles and rock posters.

Are there any special projects your working on at the moment?

Currently I am working with Santa Cruz Skateboards and have a new series of skateboard deck graphics to be released in Sept 2009.

Who are you favorite illustrators, designers or artists?

My favorite graphic artists were the ones who influenced me to become one. Since it happened while I was a child, my influences stem from Comic books, newspaper comic strips and animated cartoons. To name a few, I would say that artists like Carl Barks at Disney Studios was a major inspiration, as well as others at the time like the Fleisher Brothers and Winsor McCay who both pioneered animation. In later years I was deeply motivated by the raw humor of EC Mad Comics which later became the Mad Magazine of today. Over many years I have been a big fan of the amazing animation from Zagreb, which I consider the animation capital of the world.

What do you listen to while you work?

I always listen to music while I work, and there is no limit to the styles. I like to listen to the radio because it is random and varied, from rock to classical, and everything in between. Interestingly, because of our local University of California Santa Cruz, we have several public radio stations who play world music, and I have frequently enjoyed Serbian and Balkan folk and folk-rock music.

Can you explain meaning of "Brain Food" piece?

The Brainfood graphic was for a short story that I was commissioned to illustrate in 1976. Food is nourishment, and usually ascribed to physical maintenance and growth. Our brains, also depend on nourishment, for intelligently interpreting sensory impulses, and regulating the remaining parts of your body. We must qualify properly nourishing food as "good" food, and bad food as "garbage". And similarly, for good health, the nourishment that comes to the brain through our eyes and ears must be divided between "good" and "garbage". In some cases, discernment must be taken by close examination to distinguish the difference, but mostly we know what garbage is. Everyone has heard the phrase, "garbage in, garbage out" and the meaning is clear, for what guides us to action and comes out of the mouth is determined by the difference.

What about the relationship between the art and the skateboarding/ street fashion?

Today's street fashion was greatly influenced by skateboard art, an outgrowth of the deck graphics and sticker art that became popular during the seventies and eighties. Skateboard art was the vehicle that carried my work to the streets in most every major city of the world, and provided an enduring return for the many fruitless years that I toiled in my investment of art.

Jim, thanks for the time. Any closing words for young artists?

For closing words, I would just encourage young artists to keep drawing even if your work appears to be going nowhere. As I look back, I see many years of quietly working at my craft without realizing that I was slowly building a solid reputation and vital connections to a career that would support my family and home. It is the most wonderful thing to make a living doing what you love to do.