Drawing Your Attention to Benjamin Phillips

Words by Jon Everall

Photos by Charlotte Steeples

Amid the ever-evolving changes to Trinity Triangle, a doorway leads up to a series of artists’ studios. Inside, the staircase is hung with framed works and notes to co-workers. You are ushered further into the world of artist-illustrator Benjamin Phillips and his wife, taxidermist and studio-mate, Jazmine Miles-Long.

It’s not so much the stuffed birds that catch your eye as the meticulous and total wallcoverings. Barely a centimetre exists between one taped-up image and another. There are larger pages, bigger framed works, and each is surrounded by tiny sketches, visual cues, illustrative notes, and artistic inspiration. It’s a sketchbook of thoughts and observations spilling out into the physical world. It’s a colourful cacophony, not of chaos but order -and it exists in a way very much on one side of this space, with Jazmine’s work and interests in a very different format on the other side of the room.

"I'm aspiring to make things look beautiful, but have some deeper meaning and that you can look at and find different element that exclude wonder."

Benjamin -not Ben -Phillips, there’s enough duplication and confusion online as it is, moved to Hastings more than a decade ago. Following the familiar frustration of being moved along at the whim of landlords rather than personal choice, the high rents of Camberwell and Brockley were replaced by the more affordable costs of The Old Town. Now based in StLeonards with Jazmine and their son, you may have come across his mural in the stairwell of The Source Park, or promoting the cider festival at The Crown. He’s also behind some of the East Sussex cultural maps, distributed at Hastings Contemporary and theDe La Warr Pavilion, and a recent campaign for The Refugee Buddy Project and a Bonfire Night feature for the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer. Most immediately, he’s the draftsman behind this spring edition’s front cover (more on that later).

What you may not know about Benjamin is that he is one of the most celebrated illustrators working in Britain today. Winner of the Moira Gemmill Illustrator of the Year and ‘Illustration for Children’ category at the 2024 V&A Illustration Awards, he’s published several books, collaboratively and solo, exhibited at Towner Eastbourne and internationally, and is represented by United Agents.

How did it all begin? “I was encouraged to make work just as something to do as an activity. My dad worked in production machinery, and I remember we'd always have a big pack of surplus paper from commercial jobs that would be behind the sofa.”

Expanding on his childhood, he explained that, “I'm from quite a humble background where we never had loads. None of my toys were state of the art and were from car boot sales, and I think that there is a freedom in not wanting all of that plastic shit.” He cites Nickelodeon as more of a reference than any particular artist or illustrator. Cartoon characters were not just entities of entertainment but inspiration for his own inventions. Very young, he was anthropomorphising inanimate objects and thinking about stories he could conjure up, imagining stories he would want to hear and tell. Escaping to these scenes and people was a safe space, a stabilising presence in a home life that was at times disruptive.

Over time, inspired by the success of Aardman (Wallace and Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, etc.), Benjamin formed figures in plasticine. This creative outlet was all-consuming to thedetriment of mainstream schooling, where, for many years, he was considered a disruptive pupil. In an unfortunate sign of the times, he was not given the support he needed, one teacher going so far as to introduce the nickname ‘Neb’ in a parents’ evening.The rationale being that if he was going to act backwards, he should be called backwards.

Later still, during his foundation studies, he started to learn that a creative career might be possible. Enrolling on an Illustration degree at Brighton University was arguably the first significant step to becoming the artist he is today. It followed a couple of difficult years marked by a debilitating condition and slipped discs in his spine –the chronic pain from which still sees him work at a standing desk. InBrighton, he met Jazmine, whom he has worked alongside ever since, and whose presence encourages accountability, all while building a portfolio with a greater sense of direction. He’s drawn pretty much every day for twenty years, with a consistent sketchbook practice and strong observational drawing habit.

Benjamin’s style is deceptively simple. What might not be immediately evident on a flyer in a Hastings pub is acutely realised in his long-form graphic novels. There is a huge amount of historical research that goes into the accuracy of what is depicted. It is more than respectful, it is reverential. His Holocaust survival story, ‘One Day’, written by former Children’s Laureate and multi-hyphenate, Michael Rosen, is a stark, powerful retelling of an extraordinary, hopeful true story. His lighter but no less poignant collaboration with Ziggy Hanaor, ‘Alte Zachen’ (‘Old Things’), brings a dated and changing New York to life, directly referencing Google Maps and Street View, and heartfelt memories of his own grandmother’s home trinkets and mannerisms.

Jewish ancestry and Greek Cypriot family history feed into the artist’s identity, work and chosen collaborators. There are themes of assimilation, migration, inherited silence, and more immediately experiencedby Benjamin and Jazmine, the exhaustion of child raising, in his books. In occasional crowd scenes or montages of numerous characters, he sometimes slips in portraits of people he’s known, almost always without them being aware of it.

His palette is often subdued, but as he reasons, there wasn’t much colour worn back then, and certainly not in the war. Clothing was more utilitarian and functional. There was little of the fashion or peacocking we associate with clothes today. Depicting this, Benjamin’s drawing desk holds both a little jar of clear water (not so unusual) and a second of dirty water (a little more peculiar).

“I like working in monochrome. It’s a safer place for a lot of illustrators. In some ways, as a draftsman, you're just trying to develop your line and to represent whatever character and scene it is that you're working on.

”He continues, “Colour can almost feel frivolous in some ways. I've struggled with colour a lot in the past, and that's why I've always made colours murkier and workedwith dirty water. The vividness of untampered, coloured ink is just too saturated, and it suits me that the projects that I've worked on have had this melancholy undertone.” Explaining the grit in his images, “I struggle even drawing people who look excessively happy. Which is a strange sort of mindset to occupy when you're working in the realm of children’s books!”

While it may not be commonplace for children’s illustration, it's a style that has been widely celebrated. Benjamin has been shortlisted andwon more than half a dozen awards, with his work touring Europe, Japan, South Korea and China several times. Later this year, he will attend the prestigious Bologna Children’s Book Fair in Italy for the third time. Amid this recognition, he remains grounded and realistic. Winning several thousand pounds through a couple of awards, he obviously found fantastic. And with advances in publishing being far less than people would imagine, he’s sanguine about the scenario. “I probably worked solidly for 6 months on it. So it's like I almost got paid what I should have gotten. It's so hard to make a living from this industry.”

Is illustration inherently collaborative? Does the artist merely illustrate the text or story? Could this be the difference between a fineartist and an illustrator? “There are plenty of illustrators who self-initiate projects because the briefs aren't presented. And it's such an oversaturated industry that you have to promote yourself, and you have to make the work if someone's not coming to you to ask you to make the work. So there's like an entrepreneurial element, but I don't see a clear definition between the two schools.”

Additional response to these questions can be found in the published books previously mentioned, and ‘Shushu’, a second collaboration with author Ziggy Hanaor, coming out in March. Then there’s the ongoing work he creates and nurtures with neurodiverse members of Hastings' own Project Art Works, some of which was exhibited at Towner. But, working alone and self-initiated, he’s also written and drawn ‘De Man Met de Lange Benen’ (‘The Man with Very Long Legs’). In a quirk of international publishing, he’s received the Dutch translation and sold the French rights, but hasn’t seen the book in English.

So, the answers are multiple and complex. Benjamin's talent and understanding of the space he operates in are of the highest level. On the one hand, he’s pottering about with ceramics at Carla Wright’s Common Clay in Bexhill, and on the other, being shortlisted for the Carnegie Award.

“You look at the alumni of that award, you've got Raymond Briggs, and Quentin Blake, and these people who I look up to. They are the people who I aspire to be like, and I want to get those jobs that would go to them. And I feel like I'm good enough to be doing that now, and that just feels absurd for it to come out of my mouth.”

There is nothing crazy about that comparison. We havein our midst a quintessential talent. Benjamin Phillips has amassed a body of work and cultivated a skill that genuinely places him alongside the very best visual storytellers. Amid his preparation for promotional events of the coming months, he has carved out a little time to work on Get Hastings Spring 2026. The cover represents the intricate world of compost. It shows creepy crawlies and bugs going about their industrious activities. As new life sprouts from tree branches and flowerbeds, this is a nod to the underrepresented small workforce that churns our soil and helps bringforth spring with all its hope, colour and glory. Created at his standing desk in watery black and white, he has inked a second coloured layer and then combined them in Photoshop from scanned drawings.

What comes next? “I'm looking at making another picture book and trying to work out what story I can infuse with interesting themes and content, and to work on something which can then stimulate more conversations. I don't like the idea of making something which is too throwaway and just very superficial. I'm aspiring to make things which look beautiful, but have some deeper meaning and that you can look at and find different elements that exude wonder.”

www.benjaminphillips.co.uk/

www.instagram.com/benjamindraws