Phil Whiting was born in 1948 and spent his childhood in Hull, winning his school art prize. He studied at Newcastle, Portsmouth and Falmouth Colleges of Art, chosen because of their proximity to the sea, where tutors praised “a rare gift … the extraordinarily powerful presence of his paintings”. Whilst continuing to paint, Whiting did a variety of jobs, from dock worker to lorry driver, that gave him ‘vital’ experience and fed into the subject matter of his paintings, prior to becoming a part time art teacher. Before moving to Hackney, London in 1984, Whiting lived on the north Norfolk coast exhibiting his work in public and private galleries in London, Peterborough and Portsmouth, winning an Arts Council Award in 1981. In London he became part of the ‘New Wave of British Figurative Painting’ and although his work owed much to Bomberg and Auerbach, he identified more with the aims of the ‘German Neo Expressionists’ such as Anselm Kiefer. Like a number of London based artists, Whiting chose “positive obscurity” by moving to west Cornwall in the late 1980’s.

Phil Whiting has gained a considerable reputation for his hard hitting and evocative paintings of Cornwall’s post-industrial hinterland, which have been reproduced in many publications including English Heritage’s seminal book, ‘Images of Cornish Tin’. Concurrently with this work Whiting has been engaged on a series of paintings called ‘Places of Mourning in the Western World’. This has taken him to Flanders, Oradour, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ground Zero and in September, after accepting an invitation from the charity Funds for Refugees in Slovenia, to Srebrenica. His next solo exhibition ‘Srebrenica Paintings’ will be held in the European Parliament Building in Brussels in June 2006.

Whiting’s work has many admirers and has been selected by art critics David Lee, John Russell Taylor, William Packer and Norbert Lynton and writer and broadcaster Joan Bakewell for ‘Critics Choice’ exhibitions of the Newlyn Society of Artists, of which he is a committee member. Recently he has enjoyed further success in exhibitions at Thompson’s City Gallery, the Rainyday Gallery, Penzance and the Newlyn Gallery. Phil Whiting’s paintings have been purchased for many public and private collections including Truro School’s important collection of contemporary Cornish art and The Royal Cornwall Museum.

Phil Whiting lives with his family and paints full time on his remote farm overlooking the Cober Valley in West Cornwall.