Walter Joseph Phillips (British/Canadian 1884-1963)

Mamalilicoola, BC 1928
colour woodblock print on paper, inscribed and numbered lower left "Mamalilicola BC. 76/100" and signed lower right "W J Phillips" , this woodblock was produced in 1928

In 1927, Walter J. Phillips took his first trip to the West Coast of British Columbia, visiting and sketching at Siwash and Kwakiutl villages such as Mamalilicoola, Alert Bay and Karlukwees on Turnour Island. He was fascinated by these exotic landscapes so different than the rest of Canada, with their humidity and extensive vegetation. Of his trip to Mamalilicoola, he described his hiked into the village from the bay where his boat was moored through a “green twilight”, emerging at the villages. The scene that welcomed him was “a tall and magnificent totem pole. It stood in front of a community house, the pediment of whose façade was carved and painted with an allegorical figure of the sun, flanked by two fishes.” This became the main view of this woodcut. The stark white of the beach a product of, as he noted, broken clam shells. Phillips wrote of his time on the coast “these villages cannot be disassociated from their setting- the mountains and sea which surround them, and the clouds which alternately reveal and obliterate them, wholly or in part”. Under ten percent of Phillips' colour woodcuts are of West Coast subjects with Mamalilicoola, BC considered to be one of Phillips’s most outstanding woodcuts.

This print is 76 of an edition of 100.
Duncan Campbell Scott, Walter J. Phillips, 1947, reproduced page 19
Walter J. Phillips, Wet Paint, unpublished manuscript, undated, Glenbow Museum archives, M-969-4, described page 104
Michael J. Gribbon, Walter J. Phillips: A Selection of His Works and Thoughts, National Gallery of Canada, 1978, reproduced page 67
Roger Boulet, The Tranquility and the Turbulence, 1981, page 101, reproduced page 100
Roger Boulet, Walter J. Phillips: The Complete Graphic Works, 1981, reproduced page 293
Maria Tippett and Douglas Cole, Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art, Manitoba Record Society, 1982, page 62, reproduced in black and white page
Size: 12 h x 13 ¾ w in (with frame: 22 ¾ h x 23 ¾ w in)
ZJ21188

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