Artist Info
Phil Darrah
With a career spanning more than five decades, Phil Darrah has won appreciation and respect across the world for his abstract and landscape paintings. Born in Worthing, U.K. in 1940, Darrah studied painting at the Harrogate School of Art, Yorkshire (1957 – 60) and at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London (1961 – 64). In 1968 he moved to Canada to teach at the University of Alberta’s Department of Art and Design.
During the 1990s while grieving the death of his mother, Darrah retreated to an acreage at Mulhurst Bay south of Edmonton, where he contemplated his career as an abstract painter of stripes, blocks, and blots who’d drifted into composing slightly more representational landscapes. While preparing for a 2002 exhibition in Greece, he meditated upon a range of visual elements from a Purple Martin birdhouse in his yard to an architectural niche in a wall the Egyptian Temple of Karnak. While he toured Greece in 2002 and again in 2004, he drew and was enriched by the landscapes and antique ceramics he saw.
Darrah’s work has been featured in dozens of solo exhibitions across Alberta, the U.K., and Greece, including Songs of Love, Recollections, and in the Bradford Spring Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, England. A range of public and corporate collections around the world hold his works, including those of the Glenbow Museum, the Canada Council Art Bank, the Ministry of Public Buildings & Works in the U.K., Lombard Odier, Hong Kong , and the Fraser/Nag Partnership in Dubai. After a career spanning more than 50 years, Darrah continues to live and work at his home in Mulhurst Bay, Alberta.
