ABOUT PHIL PADWE

Philip Eliot Padwe received his MFA in Drawing from the New York Academy of Art and BA in Writing from SUNY Purchase. In between he completed a two-year independent study of Old Master drawings at the British Museum, where he fell in love with silverpoint.

 

Phil has exhibited his silverpoint drawings nationally and had his portraiture appear in The New York Times; NPR; and on NY1 News. ​He is in the permanent collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and has commissioned portraits in the collections of Columbia University and NYU's School of International Students and Scholars.

 

Phil has been teaching weekly Cast Drawing and Life Drawing classes at the Art Students League of New York since 2023 and teaches workshops in Silverpoint and Ballpoint.

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In addition to his ongoing "Trash" series Phil is currently working on new silverpoint drawings on whitewashed, collaged, antique dictionary pages. At this cultural moment when meaning itself can feel meaningless; the white gesso brushed over dictionary entries both obliterates literal meaning and becomes the drawing surface. The drawings are figurative explorations of movement and metaphor; recalling an analog, organic, world we've only just left behind, but seem fated never to return to.