Tag Archives: Vehemence

Painting and Sculpture

Audri Phillips and “Robot Prayers”; “A Thought Has No Physicality”

Monday, September 20, 2017

I met the artist Audri Phillips well over a quarter-century ago, back when I was still living on Hill Street in Ocean Park. I myself was not a painter, but knew a group of painters who went around each other’s studios and critiqued each other’s work. Besides Audri, I remember that one of the artists was Richard Bruland, the former owner of BeBop Records. Audri eventually painted the image that went on my CD/cassette of spoken word, Vehemence, from New Alliance Records (1993), and I contributed to the poem that accompanied her first computer art project, “A Thought Has No Physicality” (1995). (Note: This can be found on vimeo, but my inclusion of the link in this blog post will not grant direct access to it; hence, my mere citation of this early work.)

Audri is still working as an artist, though she stopped working on canvas about a half-dozen years ago and now paints only on the computer. Linda and I attended one of her earliest full-length collaborations that included work painted on a computer in 2011. It was a theatrical event, “Migrations,” that she staged in a geodesic dome with some other musicians. There were moments in that event that were as full of soothing gracefulness as anything I have ever absorbed.

Audri is shutting down her studio in which she worked with paint and selling all of her canvases. As she concludes this part of her life, I wish to pass on to you a link to her most recent work, “Robot Prayers,” which I believe you will enjoy and savor enough that you will hope she can keep on working in this manner for decades to come.

www.robotprayers.com

https://www.flickr.com/photos/111721388@N06/

http://www.studioarts.com/bio_audri_phillips