Description

The Dream Fullfilled by Bill Phillips Framed Consignmnet.   Limited Edition of 1,750 S/N prints 14 1/2″  x 31″ Framed as shown from a private consignment.

“It’s the holiday season of December 1945 in a small town somewhere in the United States,” says artist’s William S. Phillips. “The celebration is even more special this year because the war is finally over and the three genera-tions of the family I’ve been portraying in my previous paintings ‘If Only in My Dreams’ and ‘A Christmas Leave, When Dreams Come True’ are finally reunited for good.” The son, who has been fighting in the war, walks up the steps to his grandparents’ home with his fiancée, followed by the loyal dog that waited for him in “If Only in My Dreams” and rode with him on his way to propose marriage in “A Christmas Leave.” The Beechcraft Staggerwing in the distance, the classiest of classic planes, found years of post-war service in civilian transport. William S. Phillips completes one pilot’s story in this seasonal, nostalgic painting from his American Homefront Series in which the change in mood and direction of the war is reflected at home as the series progresses.

William S. Phillips
Phillips grew up loving art but never thought he could make it his livelihood. At college he majored in criminology and had been accepted into law school when four of his paintings were sold at an airport restaurant. That was all the incentive he needed to begin his work as a fine art painter. Bill Phillips is now a renowned aviation artist and the landscape artist of choice for many collectors. Bill’s strengths as a landscape painter, a respect and reverence for a time and place, help him when painting aviation as well as classic landscapes. Phillips often spends days observing landscape subjects. Finding companionship with the land, he is able to convey the boundlessness of nature on the painted canvas inspiring a reverence for the natural landscape in its beholders. After one of his paintings was presented to King Hussein of Jordan, Phillips was commissioned by the Royal Jordanian Air Force. He developed sixteen major paintings, many of which now hang in the Royal Jordanian Air Force Museum in Amman. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum presented a one-man show of Phillips’ work in 1986. He is one of only a few artists to have been so honored. In 1988, Phillips was chosen to be a U.S. Navy combat artist. For his outstanding work, the artist was awarded the Navy’s Meritorious Public Service Award and the Air Force Sergeants Association’s Americanism Medal. At the prestigious annual fund raiser for the National Park Service, Bill’s work has been included in the Top 100 each year he has entered the competition and his work has won the Art History Award twice. Phillips was selected as the Fall 2004 Artist in Residence at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and tapped by the U.S. Postal Service to paint the stamp illustrations and header design for a pane of twenty stamps in 1997 entitled Classic American Aircraft. He was chosen again in 2005 for a pane of twenty stamps (ten designs) entitled American Advances in Aviation. Bill’s major collection of aviation art, Into the Sunlit Splendor, was published by The Greenwich Workshop Press in 2005.