Sixty Four Stopcock Box Lids

Tom Phillips RA (1937-2023)

Large vintage artists proof screenprint by Tom Phillips.

Sixty Four Stopcock Box Lids, signed and denoted a/p ii/ii and dated in Roman numerals 1976.  The edition size was a small 50 copies.

One from the folio ‘A Walk to the Studio’, as found in the Tate collection.  Printed by Waddington Galleries, bearing a W blindstamp lower right.

Collections: the Tate; British council Art Collection; the V&A Museum; National Museum of Wales

Notes on the artist’s website (tomphillips.co.uk) about this work:

“The first in the series shows all the stopcock-box-lids between my house in Grove Park SE5 and my studio in Talfourd Road SE15. Their skull like shape aided by the degradations of time and wear link them with masks and the classical Memento Mori images, the ikons of mortality.

From the initial 35mm black and white photographs of the lids which I took in May 76, the making of the print occupied three months. It  involved blowing these photos up and aligning the bromide enlargements on to a single sheet which itself was then rephotographed in various line and tone separations: the original bromides were then coloured by me with photographic tinting inks according to colour notes I had made in the street.

From these colours and from other pencil indications the printer, Bernard Cook, was able to capture all the subtle time, weather and accident wrought variations in the sixty-four-stopcock-box-lids using twenty-six colours

Measurements: 81 x 60 cm image, 101 x 71 cm sheet size

Condition: In excellent condition, never framed. a couple of very slight soft handling / storage creases to the margins and very faint time toning right along the top edge.

This work has now been sold