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Artist Phil Irish



Phil Irish, from Elora, Ontario, Canada, makes paintings that are both fierce and beautiful. His practice extends painting into realms of collage, installation, photography and video.

His work has been shown at public museums, artist-run-centres, and commercial galleries across Canada. The Kolaj Institute, in New Orleans, featured his architecturally scaled installation “The Green Fuse”.


In 2020, he competed in CBC’s Landscape Artist of the Year Canada. His work was featured at the Quebec City Biennial, and three times shortlisted for the Kingston Portrait Prize. Travel and artist residencies have played an important role in developing his themes. He has developed new work during residencies at the Symposium in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec, The Banff Centre, and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2017 he began his arctic themes: he visited Baffin Island as part of CanadaC3, and in 2023 he explored Svalbard as part of The Arctic Circle residency.


This summer, he will spend 2 weeks in Spain as a recipient of the Tablas de Daimiel Artistic Residency Award. He holds degrees from York (MFA) and Guelph (BA) and leads the art program at Redeemer University in Ancaster, Ontario.



"I am a painter whose work has been energized by collage processes for more than a decade. I am primarily chopping apart and reassembling elements that I have painted myself, though increasingly the surrounding context (the gallery space or the surrounding landscape) have become critical elements of the work. It is powerful to cut apart images that have been crafted with care. The works involve processes of care, skill, loss, sacrifice, and imaginative regeneration. My work has been spurred on by encounters in landscapes that speak of ecological fragility. First, I contrasted the glaciers of the Rocky Mountains with the vast open pits of the Albert oil sands. Since then, much of my work has explored the fragility and beauty of the arctic. Statistics and lists of facts can be numbing. It is one of the powers of art to be able to face and address the hardest truths. Through the compelling allure of beauty, the penetrating insight of metaphor, and the holistic engagement of emotion, the arts can crack open our callousness and denial."



Tell us a little about yourself (where you are from) and your background in the arts.

During a kind of midlife crisis, when my life commitments were in some shambles, I returned to university to pursue my MFA. I had been an artist, well, always! But this raw time proved to be invaluable in reinventing my work and the approaches I have taken since.

Living in a small town with my family – my studio is in the “double garage” – this has helped me to have a sustained, dedicated studio practice.


I am married to Anna Mark, who is poet, and our rapport in the search for allusive meaning encourages us both.


What kind of work are you currently making?

I am developing new painterly collages in settings closer to home. I am interested in a stronger relationship to place over time – listening, attending, to a world I want to care for. I am working with Asian papers of different kinds – mulberry papers, bark papers – and painting observational passage, abstract evocations, and more drawn elements.

All of this is fodder for collage: images break apart and find new resolutions as we search for wholeness.


I am increasingly interested in wetlands, as threatened sites of migration and mixing. Metaphors abound, and the beauty of birds is irresistible. While this interest in wetlands arises close to home, I have been selected for the Tablas de Daimiel Artistic Residency Award – making new work in one of Spain’s national parks. I am imagining how to make the most of that short, exploratory residency!


What is a day like in the studio for you?

Studio life has arcs and rhythms – I enjoy the variety. Some weeks are about beginnings, searching, optimistically reaching out. Some weeks are hot on the chase of what the work wants to be, full of decisions, revisions, and transformations. There is the methodical jigsaw-puzzle of adhering all the collage pieces together – sometimes this takes as long as doing the actual painting!


There is that work of translating brainstorming into proposal writing – less glamorous, but important if I want to do exciting things. There is a prayerfulness that supports all of these activities. A sense of participating in something beyond my edges.


What are you looking at right now and/or reading?

Since this is a “studio visit” conversation, I’ll mention Bruce Herman’s book, Makers by Nature, about “faith, hope, and art.” The tone of the book feels like an extended studio visit! It is constructed as a collection of letters to students he has mentored as an art professor. While theoretical ideas abound, they are embodied in relationships and physical studio practices. I enjoy picking it up regularly to read one section at a time – “Process and Risk,” “Prayer and Painting,” or “Failure,” for example.


I was smitten by Daniel Mason’s novel North Woods. The episodic way that the novel moves through time, changing voice and genre with each shift, touches something profound about the meaning of places through time. It is full of wit and imagination.


Where can we find more of your work? (ex. website/insta/gallery/upcoming shows)













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