Thomas Philbrick

Thomas Philbrick (@philbrick_arts) is a writer, artist and composer. For his visual art, he works in graphite, producing photorealistic and occasionally surreal images. It was a delight collaborating with him on this series of images, each of us gaining an appreciation for the other’s work. I’m particularly impressed with the scale and timeline of each of his pieces, each detail being slowly revealed, bit by bit, built up by the fine point of a pencil. My images are cast in nearly an instant, to later be shaped by broad strokes of color and contrast that slowly work their way down to smaller details.

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Pencil drawing involves many tools, but at its heart feels to me a primal kind of creation, scratching values onto a surface until an image is resolved. The specific style pours out from years of study, observation and muscle memory. By comparison, my practice requires the relatively recent technological marvels of optical design and chemistry or semiconductors.

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We talked about the elements that our work nonetheless have in common, as the piece he’s working on (and the photorealistic genre as a whole) are greatly informed by photography. The blurred grains of sand falling from the hands of Abraham are something we intuitively interpret as motion, largely because of the motion blur we see in slower shutter speed photography.