Interview #158 — Jeffrey Phillips
by Kim Lam
Jeffrey Phillips is an Indian-born Australian illustrator with a curious mind, who enjoys drawing the world he sees around him.
Jeffrey spoke to Kim Lam about mornings, personal style and stories revealed in drawn lines.
Origin story time! Before becoming one of Melbourne’s most beloved illustrators today, you started off in Communications Systems Engineering, and then quietly switched to ‘an easier but still respectable’ double major in Finance and Marketing. One of the things I most enjoy when in your company is that I regularly get to witness these epiphanies you have – ideas seem to strike you with vivid marvel and conviction. Can you take me through what led to these kinds of moments during your leap into illustration?
Epiphanies are like the finish line of a long, long process. My switch to illustration via finance was like watching dominoes fall in slow motion. It began when I dropped out of engineering, and enrolled in commerce. At this point drawing for me was a fun and rewarding hobby. Nothing more.
I graduated and worked in financial advice. Drawing continued as a hobby, but I was beginning to draw things for friends too. My job was uninspiring and unchallenging work, but I kept plugging away, not knowing what else to do. I began to take courses in drawing and painting. I bought a Wacom tablet. I learnt Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. It began to feel constructive and worthwhile.
Meanwhile my employer, recognising my lack of interest in the job, kindly let me go. Thus fell a crucial domino.
Unmoored, I made the slightly sickening decision to start from scratch again in my late twenties. Suppressing my doubts, I enrolled in TAFE to study illustration. I absolutely tore through that TAFE course. I’d complete my coursework and keep going with the next project. When I went home I worked on small odd design jobs for people like making logos, websites, brochures… anything I could get my hands on. I drew storyboards for my film-maker friends which led to drawing storyboards for TV commercials. It was touch and go for a couple of years. There were days where I’d be checking the mail multiple times, hoping for a cheque to come in. Eventually things began to pick up though.
The work was exciting and extremely diverse for a niche industry like illustration, in a small town like Perth. I even wound up being a regular court sketch artist for all the major WA news media networks.
Eventually I made my way over to Melbourne, all the while fretting about potentially losing all my clients and work. It never happened – the dominoes kept falling in the right direction.
You have impeccable sense of style across many fronts, including how you show up in person, as well as how you show up on the page. What informs your style, and how do you go about integrating it? How do you go about feeling your way into the kinds of shapes you want to express?
I try really hard to avoid thinking about style. I used to be fixated on it. Do I have one? Do people see me the same way I see me? Am I consistent enough? I feel like I do too many things. It still induces a little worry in me sometimes. But then I take a breath and relax. If I were a snail, my style would show up in my slimy trail, not at my destination.
Style, which is what comes out, is informed by what goes in. I prefer to focus on this because the way I approach the page almost inevitably shows up in the drawn lines. If I’m feeling playful and relaxed, it shows up in the carefree uptick at the end of a mark – a lightness of being, effortlessness. Or, it shows up in the heavy impression at the end of a firm line – deliberate and sure. Or when many separate lines are connected by a faint thread—hurried and frantic.
I recognise these marks in anyone’s lines because I’m so attuned to them in my own. It’s like a hidden story on the page revealing what a person was going through. Like being a forensic investigator.
When I’m feeling confident, relaxed and playful, there are no wrong lines. Just different directions. Jazz musician Herbie Hancock says ‘there are no wrong notes – you can turn anything that happens into…something of value’. This is a good place to be in.
When I am stressed or under pressure, lines are constantly redrawn, there is a temptation to retreat to safe motifs. Drawings done with a specific outcome (mostly commercial work) are most at risk of going down this path. It’s like folding and throwing a paper plane and enjoying the way it soars. Then someone tells you the plane now has to hit a target. It changes everything about the process.
To overcome this, I often try to draw a little bit faster than my brain can keep up. To draw more from the gut, and less from the head. Especially when I’m trying to conjure up something unknown for something known. This often leads to magical results on and off the page.
A favourite poet of mine, Yanyi, recently said, ‘One of the joys of taking your time is withholding your life for yourself.’ When I heard this, something you once told me instantly came to mind: ‘Take your time in the mornings, you should have them to yourself.’ Can you share more thoughts along these lines? It is such a generous thing to say.
I am very, very lucky to make a good living by doing a thing that I love to do. But sometimes it’s a bit of a shit thing because I have no definable barrier between what is work and not work. Depending on how I define what ‘work’ is, I am either hardly working or I never stop. This work-blurriness means I have to take decisive action to fence off a kind of safe space. It’s like I have a little private flower garden, and there is a herd of restless cattle (read: deadlines, obligations, emails) milling around outside just waiting to barge in and trample my daffodils.
Nobody enjoys waking up to a burning platform so I’ll wake up earlier if I have to, just to have a slice of that early calm. I grind some beans and make an espresso. I decide whether it’s a mango pickle or marmalade on toast day. Maybe a couple of eggs get fried.
When I’m fed, dressed and ready, I throw the gate open to the milling herd. The rest of my day is filled with doing whatever needs doing for everyone. It can sometimes take a lot of effort to close the gate at the end of the day. But the garden will always be waiting again for me the next morning as long as I make the time for it.
Pre-pandemic, you routinely travelled to live for a significant segment of the year in New York. What drew you to this annual ritual?
I think an important feature of this was that, for the first time in my life, I took an action that fate didn’t push me into. No more doing things because I felt obliged to, or was forced to. I stepped right into it. So it had a really powerful feeling of agency. Like I was finally calling the shots.
Secondly it was the change of environment. We’re like plants that ‘survive’ in one corner of a room, but thrive when you move us somewhere else. I definitely love living in my hometown Melbourne, but the novelty of a new city can be incredibly energising. Given the freedom to choose, I chose New York.
I chose it because I think New York (as distinct from America) holds a kind of outsized position when it comes to cultural influence and I wanted to get to the heart of it. If culture was a global spiderweb, I think NY would be at its epicentre. It also happens to be one of the most culturally diverse cities on earth. In an increasingly divided world, this is a precious thing. There are over 800 languages spoken in the city and 160 are in Queens alone.
A lop-sided outcome of this dynamic winds up being a decidedly one-way flow of cultural capital from this epicentre. Why does the whole world read the New York Times and The New Yorker, not the Sydney Morning Herald? Why does everyone know 5th Avenue and Macys, but not Bourke St and Myers? Given the choice I wanted to be upstream of that flow. I wanted to jump in, make things and watch them float out into the world.
During my trip last year, Greta Thunberg’s Climate Strike rally was staged in downtown Manhattan. The organisers repeatedly reminded the crowd that ‘the world was watching’. They asked the crowd to make space for the cameras. They knew exactly why they were there. And it did become international news. To do anything in New York is like doing it in front of the World. To do anything elsewhere, feels like it just stays put.
So did it work out? Undoubtedly. I was surrounded by no shortage of inspiration. After repeated visits, I found community and kindred spirits. I made lifelong friends. I made great work. I found a second home. I pushed myself further than I ever thought possible. I felt like I was a citizen of the world and that the world had also shrunk. The things that felt out of my grasp were now kind of tangible, if not achievable right away.
As fellow illustrators we have previously shared our challenges when working with client briefs where there is a desire to visually represent ‘diversity’. It’s not uncommon for requests to be made to either mellow out or exaggerate the desired diversity ‘look’. What trends are you seeing in the field of illustration here, and how do you approach this visual language balancing act, with its multi-faceted ethics?
Visually representing diversity is an interesting challenge because you can achieve this by being really specific, or you can offer more ambiguity through abstraction.
Taking the ambiguous route means there is more space for any viewer to project themselves into an illustrated scenario. Examples include racially ambiguous blue and pink-skinned characters, tiny heads, amorphous bodies, anthropomorphic shapes, and more. While it’s important to acknowledge that these elements can be a consistent part of an artist’s style, it’s not a stretch to wonder if the popularity of these trends is also an industry response to representing diversity through a kind of all-inclusive ambiguity. The purple people are so popular that they have attracted their own share of critique. It’s like we’re drawing everyone and no one.
In their embrace of ambiguity, these trends may also reveal a fear of drawing race. So where does that leave the specific approach? I believe this fear comes from two places. Firstly we can’t look to history for inspiration. Most notable luminaries in the industry are old white guys, drawing in a very western tradition. While their techniques are valuable to learn from – there is very little diversity in their work, and, where it does exist, non-white races and cultures are often drawn as stereotypes or rude caricature.
Secondly, in this absence of a well-trodden path, no one wants to take a risk. We are all very familiar with what’s wrong and what not to do. But what does right look like? Drawing people requires an acute attention to detail that can often feel uncomfortable. How dark is too dark? What’s culturally appropriate? Clients know this too and generally they favour safe and ambiguous.
So what’s the best approach? As we continue to recognise and celebrate the different types of diversity around us, we need to construct a visual language that represents not just broad ambiguity but also bold specificity.
As illustrators, we’re creating a fresh language of inclusive, visual representation from scratch and this is a stirring moment for us to chart a new path. For clients this means putting in a little more effort into seeking out and hiring diverse creatives, not just focusing on the optics of the work itself.
You were brought up in both India and Australia. Can you speak about your relationship to your mixed Indian-Australian identity? How has it changed over time?
I was born in (then) Bombay and grew up in the seaside suburb of Bandra. One of my earliest memories is my first kindergarten day at my alma mater St. Stanislaus. A bunch of curious mothers are gathered around me and they want to know where I’m from. Where I live. It was drilled into 4-year-old me to never reveal this information to strangers so I very deliberately throw them off the trail by pointing in the opposite direction to where I know my home is and telling them “there.”
“There? Where’s there?” they laugh and cajole. They think it’s cute but they never succeed in finding out. This winds up becoming a recurring theme as I grow up.
Many years later I am shipped off on my own to start high school in Perth. I’m living with my cousins and I’ve only been in the country two weeks at this point. Everything is new and little is familiar. Australia is everything and nothing like I expected. It’s exciting but also terrifying. At recess on my first day, I step out into the school courtyard and it dawns on me that I have to relearn everything I know about fitting in. Despite my new high school being quite multi-cultural, it was confusing and surprising to realise that being ‘Indian’ wasn’t cool. Back then it felt like there was no common cultural reference point other than ‘curry’ and an ‘Apu accent’.
My accent primarily drew attention to me being different so I worked on a new one. I wore this new accent whenever I left the house, like shoes or sunscreen. I realise now how common it is for first-gen kids to have a ‘home’ and an ‘away’ accent but at the time it felt incredibly inauthentic. The accent was part of a broader set of adjustments I found myself making as I adapted to my new home and wrestled with my dual identity.
My Indian heritage is already quite mixed. My father is Anglo-Indian and my mother is East-Indian. Ask anyone from India and you’ll quickly learn that being Indian isn’t enough of an answer. There are a myriad ethno-cultural-religious groups you can be a part of. Punjabi, Parsi, Bengali, Delhi-ite, Mumbaikar, Muslim, Tamil, Goan… no one is simply Indian until you find yourself outside India. Then suddenly we are all the same.
Like most Catholic Indians in cosmopolitan Mumbai, we were ethnically Indian but culturally relatively western. We spoke English at home, eschewed traditional wear and went to English-speaking schools. It was at school in India that I studied Hindi as well as Marathi and French. While I barely passed any of them back then, my Hindi has definitely improved a lot since!
I have always felt like I occupy a kind of strange space in between multiple cultures and subcultures. It has allowed me to shift between them with ease but never be at ease within any of them.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on illustrations for the 3rd season of The Observers project. Earlier during lockdown I also had the opportunity to illustrate for a UNFCCC virtual event, which was a real highlight!
Do you have any advice for emerging freelancers in the creative field?
Illustration is going to continue to play a big role in driving the visual communication in the digital age. It’s a great time to be picking up a pen to be honest. In this world of uncertainty I hope that counts for something.
Who are you inspired by?
I love what Samin Nosrat did with Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, with a special shout out to the wonderful illustrations by Wendy McNaughton whose graphic journalism work is an inspiration in its own right.
What are you listening to?
Podcasts I am enjoying at the moment include Seth Godin’s Akimbo, where Seth breaks down contemporary ‘culture’ in a refreshingly uncomplicated way—why do we do things this or that way? Do we still need to? Also: How to Citizen with Baratunde. A podcast about making citizen a verb, and understanding how people can wield civic power. Musically, I’m all over the place. I’ve been loving some of Spotify’s genre-bending playlists, like Low-Key and POLLEN.
What are you reading?
Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political order. I recently read an essay by Fukuyama about the impact of the pandemic on today’s political order, it got me thinking a lot about this.
How do you practice self-care?
I do things that future me will appreciate, like making the bed every morning so it’s a welcoming place to return to at night, or if I am cooking something nice, I’ll freeze a bit of extra sauce so future-me can enjoy a good meal if he is too busy to cook.
What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?
Being Asian–Australian refers to how I arrived at this point in space and time. It reconciles my past to my present. But I also want to say I am Australian. I want to do so without having to disregard my past, nor my identity, but rather to contribute meaningfully to redefining the norm of what it means to be Australian. This is what Australian looks like. It’s not and has never been a monoculture.
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Interview and Illustrations by Kim Lam.