Philippa Beardsley lives, works, and paints in Philadelphia. Originally from New Jersey, she came to Philadelphia for school and has been here ever since. She holds a BFA in painting from the University of the Arts, and an MFA from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

 

Beardsley likes to work on many paintings at once. Her goal is to create work that can both coexist together as a group and also stand alone as individual paintings. She likes to make arrangements with her pieces; similar to the relationships among tarot cards, these arrangements may change and exist in many ways. The painting begins with the construction of the wood panels or cigar boxes and other box-like objects that she deconstructs and turns into

painting surfaces. Beardsley uses mostly acrylic paint and other mixed materials. Her paintings develop in layers and are painted from memory. She paints what she loves. 

 

The paintings in this exhibition are about Beardsley's relationships with architecture in Philadelphia. In particular, buildings she encountered on walks in Fishtown and Kensington. For example, “Pizza Parlor” is about the sensory experience of her favorite pizza place - walking by every day, sometimes going in, smelling the pizza and the bubbling hot cheese, looking in through the windows and seeing the people inside. “Thief” is based on two buildings - one little brick house painted white and another building that was missing a window and had a large rectangular hole where it once was. She would walk by this building and look into the hole for some kind of memory that might be left on the walls. “Switch” is also inspired by the building with the missing window, as well as a discarded switch plate she picked up on one of her walks.