Cover Image: Glen Phillips at home with his notebooks and paintings, reflecting on a lifetime of poetry and place. Photo supplied.

A painter in words, a poet in paint.
Glen Phillips’ Portfolio of 150 Paintings and Landscapes.

When Italian Renaissance masters painted the Mona Lisa or Perugino’s religious scenes, landscape lurked in the background – blue-hazed hills, misty valleys hovering beyond the main subject. Gradually, over centuries, those backgrounds migrated forward, claiming their own dignity until landscape became subject, genre, complete language. 

Something similar has occurred in the artistic life of Professor Glen Phillips, though his journey has taken not centuries but a distinguished career spanning more than six decades.

Phillips is recognised as one of Western Australia’s most accomplished poets – a literary cartographer who has mapped the wheatbelt, granite outcrops, salt lakes and salmon gums of this ancient continent with linguistic precision. Born in 1936 in Southern Cross, a remote gold-mining town, he spent his formative years in the state’s wheatbelt region, that rugged semi-arid landscape that became the foundational subject of his poetry. A steady stream of volumes has followed, including major works like In the Hollow of the Land: Collected Poems 1968–2018, which consolidated 50 years of verse.

Yet all this time, another art has been developing – not in the background exactly, but in a companion register, a visual counterpoint to his verbal music. His new Portfolio of 150 Paintings and Landscapes represents the full emergence of this lifelong practice: Phillips’ watercolours stepping forward from behind the musical screen of his poetry to claim their own authority.

This is not an exhibition catalogue in the conventional sense. It’s something rarer, more intimate: a portable exhibition, yes; but also an illuminated book for our secular age, a vade mecum – that beautiful Latin phrase meaning “go with me” – as we traverse the landscape of our own lives. In these 150 paintings, spanning from the wheatbelt towns of his childhood to the canal-threaded streets of Venice, from the granite tors of Hyden to the ploughed fields of Tuscany, we find a trusted guide who has learned to translate place into both linguistic and visual poetry.

Consider an excerpt from Phillips’ poem “Sounds of Summer – Water” from his 2022 collection Seedsongs:

Where ferns stoop among balga trunks
listen now to the bracken-browned trickle
of water among granite stones, merging
into ranked drone of crouching cicadas
in forest crowns of jarrah and karri.

Notice what Phillips accomplishes here. The poem begins with a visual imperative – “where ferns stoop” – establishing our position. But then comes that remarkable injunction: “listen now.” We’re asked to hear the “bracken-browned trickle” – colour becomes audible, the modifier synesthetically fusing the visual with the sonic. This is a poet who paints with sound, who composes with colour, who understands landscape as sensory immersion.

To fully comprehend Phillips’ dual practice, we must turn to the Chinese tradition. For over a millennium, Chinese literati have understood something Western art history often struggles to grasp: that poetry and landscape painting are not separate disciplines but complementary manifestations of unified aesthetic vision. The Northern Song scholar Su Shi wrote of Tang dynasty master Wang Wei: “When one savours Wang Wei’s poems, there are paintings in them. When one looks at Wang Wei’s paintings, there are poems.”

Phillips has lived this integration throughout his career. His academic work at Edith Cowan University, where he served as Honorary Professor and Director of the International Centre for Landscape and Language, explored precisely these connections between environment and written word. His extensive time teaching in China – at universities in Shanghai and Heilongjiang province – resulted in bilingual publications like Shanghai Suite and Heilongjiang Summers, demonstrating his ability to apply his landscape-focused lens to foreign environments.

The Chinese tradition formalised this understanding in the “Three Perfections”: the harmonious integration of painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Phillips’ watercolours possess this calligraphic quality – those quick, gestural brushstrokes rendering the windblown tree at Greenough, the fluid washes suggesting granite monoliths, the delicate linear notations of fence posts and pepper trees.

Consider painting number 144: “Woody Pear Winged Seed, Southern Cross.” The very title evokes both botanical precision and lyrical flight – “winged seed” suggesting morphology and metaphor, dispersal and migration. In the Chinese shan shui tradition – literally “mountain and water” – landscape represents far more than scenery; it embodies cosmic principles accessible through contemplative engagement. Phillips’ paintings function similarly: not topographical documents but meditations on place.

What distinguishes this portfolio particularly is its geographical range, its willingness to apply the Western Australian eye – trained on wheatbelt light, on jarrah forest shadow – to landscapes far removed. Tuscan ploughed fields echo the geometry of Merredin wheat country; Venice’s canals receive the same phenomenological precision as Lake Yeyening. Phillips has learned what the great Australian watercolourists – Hans Heysen, Lloyd Rees, Albert Namatjira – all understood: that watercolour’s transparency makes it ideally suited to capturing the ineffable quality of light as it transforms landscape into atmosphere, emotion, memory.

Now in his ninth decade, Phillips remains active in the literary scene – patron and life member of the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre, founder of the Talus Prize, and recent recipient of “Highly Commended” in the 2024 Ros Spencer Poetry Prize. A prize now bears his name.

This portfolio is more than a collection of individual works. As we traverse its pages – from Southern Cross to Shanghai, from Lake Ballard to Lombardy – we learn to see through Phillips’ eyes: the way light strikes granite, the way shadow pools beneath a salmon gum, the way distance dissolves into haze. This is the gift of the companion: not to replace our vision but to refine it, to teach us how to look more carefully at the landscapes through which we move.

Ultimately, Portfolio of 150 Paintings and Landscapes celebrates the work of a poet and artist who has devoted most of his long life to the patient practice of seeing and rendering, of listening and transcribing, of walking through landscape and bringing back “news that stays news.”

Portfolio of 150 Paintings and Landscapes and other titles by Professor Glen Phillips are available from Crow Books.