In Turbocharged Porsches, Artist Richard Phillips Finds a New Muse



By TAMARA WARREN

Richard Phillips, with his 1992 Porsche 965 on the set of a photo shoot last year for Elle magazine.Courtesy of the artistRichard Phillips, with his 1992 Porsche 965 on the set of a photo shoot last year for Elle magazine.

On a balmy March afternoon in Manhattan, the artist Richard Phillips was breaking in the refurbished engine on his 1992 Porsche 965. Mr. Phillips, who is 6-foot-5, just missed scraping his head on the roofline of the white sports car.

“For me, the 1992 965 Turbo represents the apex of Porsche design before the 993 came in,” he said, referencing the internal designations of consecutive 911 models. “Those are completely out-of-control cars. I love the car because there’s no safety net in it. It’s a great car to learn in.”

Pulling onto the West Side Highway, he glanced down at the gauges. He still had 1,500 miles to log before he felt comfortable bringing the car, whose doors are stamped in black with a No. 93 graphic, to Lime Rock Park in Connecticut for hot laps. He calculated that he could drive to Atlanta, Chicago or take eight trips to Montauk to reach his self-imposed deadline.

An Audi R8 driver taunted him from the right lane, revving his engine. “I promised Powertech I’d be gentle,” he said of the Porsche service and tuning center in New Jersey where his car is maintained. The Audi driver gave up the dare and sped away. “I tend to drive the speed limit,” he said. “People take one look at this car and they want to race.””

Mr. Phillips, whose vivid pop-culture portraiture is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Modern, recently adopted performance driving classes as a way to unwind from his work. He began taking driver’s education classes last year at local tracks through the Porsche Club of America and was instantly smitten with performance driving. “I found out all my driving inclinations were wrong. The learning experience has taught me to be a better driver,” he said. “When you’re on the track and you’re in the midst of driving, you feel relaxed.”

Mr. Phillips is making new paintings for a solo exhibition coming this fall at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Having recently taken up photography and filmmaking, he has been able to channel his interest in sports cars into his career. For the December issue of Elle magazine, he shot an editorial spread that featured the fashion model and television host China Chow posing with Mr. Phillips’s white Porsche and another 1992 Porsche belonging to his friend, the curator Neville Wakefield. “We brought the cars to Studio 59 on the West Side, brought them up in the freight elevator and worked with China to create this set-up,” he said.

In another experiment, he directed the short film “Sasha Grey,” in which the former pornographic actress drives a Lotus Evora along Mullholland Drive in Los Angeles. For the cover of Lotus magazine, he painted Ms. Grey in profile behind the wheel of the Evora. The cover was accompanied by a 16-page spread and an interview between Mr. Phillips and the author James Frey. Lotus loaned Mr. Phillips an Evora S to play with for the remainder of the year.

Cars are a relatively new passion for Mr. Phillips. “I literally drove the worst cars,” he said. “I had a ’69 Volvo handed down from my sister with a broken accelerator pedal. It was the car my dad taught me drive in at the Westside Cemetery.” Mr. Phillips, who grew up in Marblehead, Mass., eventually upgraded in 2002 to a 1974 Mercedes-Benz 450 SLC. His next car, a Mini Cooper S Clubman, first piqued his interest in speed.

Last spring, he took a ride in Mr. Wakefield’s 1992 Porsche 965 Turbo. The sensation of turbo boost changed everything. Mr. Phillips was soon online hunting his perfect Porsche, which he found close to home through a connection at the Porsche Club of America, who sold him a car that had been sitting still on a trailer. “He was looking to see if I was going to use the car for its intended purposes,” he said.

Mr. Phillips likened performance driving to surfing, another of his pastimes. “You’ve got to paddle it out right there,” he said. “If you go out recklessly you’ll find yourself in a dangerous situation. You have to be quite humble.” An expensive mishap on the track cost him a set of valves, which helped the lesson sink in.

His challenge is to reconcile his love of performance cars with an oeuvre that, until last year, paid them little mind. “I have a plan,” he said. “It won’t be for my upcoming show. I’m still in the formation stage. But the piece that I did in Elle is a declaration that it will be a part of my work.” He cites Troy Lee’s helmet designs, the motorsport photographer Bob Chapman and Porsche’s Flying Lizard Motorsports American Le Mans Series team as his primary influences.

He intends to break from traditional representations of GT cars that he says he believes are prevalent in painting. “Motorsports needs its paintings. It’s not brushy painting with hyperrealism and cars going by fast. You need powerful, strong images that communicate the enormity of the interest,” he said. “The quality of the work has to be on the level of what the drivers are doing. The expression must meet the criteria.”

He follows several American Le Mans Series drivers on Twitter. His next phase of research is to attend his first Le Mans series race this season. “I’ll see what’s possible when I see a GT in person,” he said. “The drivers are artists in their own right. To me, these guys are the biggest stars in the world.”


Link to article: In Turbocharged Porsches, Artist Richard Phillips Finds a New Muse - NYTimes.com

 

Very cool, great find!