If you think someone is ruining your life, you're right. It's you. —Phil Hale.
Phil Hale at Quarantine
Phil Hale is a British painter whose work sits at the border between figuration and something harder to name -the point where a painting stops being a picture and becomes a signal. Born in 1963, raised in Kenya and Massachusetts, apprenticed at sixteen to painter R.R. Berry, he moved to London and has lived there since.
His early career is associated with the books he illustrated for Stephen King. In the 1990s he produced work for Warner Bros, Playboy, DC Comics, Sony, and Penguin. He later transitioned to portraiture -commissions include Tony Blair's official portrait for the Houses of Westminster, Thomas Adès for the National Portrait Gallery, and Muttiah Muralitharan for Lord's Cricket Ground. His photographic work has appeared in Dazed and Confused and AnotherMan. In 2014 he shot G-Star Raw's global campaign with Lily Cole and Magnus Carlsen. He has worked on films by Darren Aronofsky and David Slade.
His paintings have been exhibited internationally, including shows at Anita Rogers Gallery in New York.
Phil Hale has mentored at Quarantine twice: Interzone (October 2024) and Tears in Rain (April 2026).
What Phil Hale does NOT do at Quarantine
If you know Phil Hale from Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn -where he's been a recurring presence since 2016, alongside Jeremy Mann, Nadezda, and Karla Ortiz- you know what he's like on a stage. THU is a remarkable event: 700+ attendees, inspirational talks, gallery sessions where artists paint live, and the kind of energy that comes from putting that many creative people in a room together.
Quarantine is not that.
At THU, Phil speaks to hundreds. At Quarantine, he sits across from you, looks at you, and says something you'll think about for months.
At THU, the format is talks, panels, live demonstrations, and networking. The audience watches. The speakers deliver. The energy is collective, outward, and electric.
At Quarantine, there is no audience. There are no talks in the conventional sense. There is no networking, no panels, no industry connections, no recruitment fair. There are 63 artists, 7 mentors, and an island.
The energy is inward, slow, relentless, and private.
RADICALLY private.
Phil Hale does not teach a painting workshop at Quarantine. He does not demonstrate his technique. He does not stand at the front of a room and walk you through his colour palette, his process, or his method of building a painting from collage to canvas.
He does not give you a masterclass in the conventional sense -the kind where a famous artist paints in front of you while you take notes and hope something transfers by proximity.
He does not tell you what's wrong with your painting. He does not tell you what's right with it either.
He does not teach you to paint like Phil Hale.
What he does instead, across three private 45-minute mentorships over the week, is sit with your work -just yours, just you- look at it longer than you've probably looked at it yourself, and say something that doesn't sound like advice. It sounds like a fact you already knew but couldn't afford to admit.
He points at the one square inch where you stopped performing and started painting. And then he asks you why you didn't do the whole canvas like that.
Not a teacher. A signal.
Phil Hale describes himself as a receiving channel, not a transmitter.
His art is built on the idea that a painter's job is not to impose a vision onto the canvas, but to receive a signal from the work itself -and to have the judgement to recognise it when it arrives.
This is not a metaphor. It is how he paints. And it is what makes his mentorship at Quarantine different from anything you've experienced at a painting retreat, a conference talk, or an art workshop.
At Quarantine, Phil does not arrive with answers. He arrives with the same vulnerability he asks of you. As he put it after his first week on Lazaretto Island:
That week totally blew my mind. I'm still gluing it back together. A genuinely profound and beautiful experience.
The mentors at Quarantine are not just visiting speakers. They are not here for money. They are on the island for seven days. No phones. No audience. No separation between their role and yours. The only difference is that they've been doing this longer, and they've made more mistakes -which, in Phil's world, is the only qualification that matters.
From his masterclass
We don't publish masterclass transcripts. What happens on the island stays on the island, right?
But Phil Hale's thinking operates in fragments -short, sharp, often counterintuitive observations that hit differently depending on where you are in your work.
Here are some of them.
On technique:
Technique is not art.
Phil is explicit about this. Technique is a tool, and tools are necessary. But the moment technique becomes the point -the moment you rely on skill to protect you from risk- it stops serving the work and starts serving your fear. The academic approach, in his words, is a death sentence that only leads to more death and more sentences.
What people want from your work is you. Not the model. Not the method. You.
And the version of you they want is not the polished one. It's the one underneath -the one you keep editing out.
The ugliness and the blobiness is more me than the refinement. If I tried to eliminate my crudeness, I'd be erasing myself from my own work.
On being your own enemy:
If you think someone is ruining your life, you're right. It's you.
Phil doesn't soften this. The enemy is not the market, the gallery system, the algorithm, or the lack of time. The enemy is the internal architecture of protection you built when you were young and competent enough to need it — and that now runs your studio like a warden.
I am my own enemy. That is not a metaphor.
His exhibition called Enemy wasn't about conflict or moral ambiguity. It was a portrait of the only person standing between him and the work he was capable of producing.
On the signal:
I am a child. I know nothing. I'm stuck in my black cupboard with these little ducts that touch everything. I'm inventing everything from these feeble little signals. And I'm not pushing. I need those signals. I have to find some way of receiving them clearly.
This is Phil's operating system. He doesn't plan a painting, impose a concept, or decide what it should mean. He collects thousands of images — from newspapers, documents, whatever catches his eye — sifts through them in a binary yes/no process, and waits for the moment when two images come together and produce what he calls an electrical circuit. Then he paints.
The ones that work are obvious. Like connecting two live wires. There's a spark.
I will never know what I painted. And I love that. It calms me to a ridiculous degree.
On self-censorship:
One of my big problems was self-censorship. I was trapped inside my own inherited conditioning.
Phil sees self-censorship as the silent killer of authentic work. Not the dramatic kind — not the fear of painting something controversial. The quiet kind: the editing you do before you even pick up the brush. The ideas you dismiss before they reach the canvas because some internal policeman — installed when you were five — decided they weren't good enough.
If you self-censor, you're almost certainly cutting out the most important elements.
Even if it's dumb, I'm interested. I want to know if it's stupid. Things have to be put to the test.
On professionalism:
I grew up in a family of professional painters, and I wanted to be professional. But I don't want to be professional anymore. I want to be an amateur.
Amateur, from the Latin amare — to love. Phil sees professionalism as a trap that replaces your relationship with the work with a relationship with the outcome. The technical way of learning, measuring, grading, qualifying — all of it gets in the way of your own reflexes, your own engagement, your own relationship with what you're making and what it's becoming.
I can be painting a picture, halfway through, and suddenly think: this is a ten-thousand-dollar painting. At that moment, the painting is over. You can't continue. You might be thinking about the holiday you'll take when you sell it. You just can't do it.
On collage and judgement:
The collage tells you that technique does not matter. It eliminates skill, ego, everything academic. What's left is judgement — and judgement towers over everything.
For Phil, collage was the breakthrough that changed how he makes paintings. Not because of what it adds, but because of what it removes. When you're working with found images — photographs from newspapers, fragments you didn't create — there's nothing to hide behind. No rendering to impress with. No technical mastery to perform. Just your eye, your decisions, and whether two things placed together produce a signal or noise.
You can learn more by cutting images from a newspaper and finding relationships than by painting nude figures with three-quarter lighting from above — which is a death sentence.
On doubt:
Doubt is the sophisticated response.
Not confidence. Not certainty. Doubt. The willingness to be wrong, to wait, to let the painting correct you instead of the other way around.
Oil paint is counterintuitive. It does the opposite of what you expect. That is incredible signal. That is the value of it.
The oil paint is a philosophical proposition which you can examine as an object. It tests your basis for living. It will show you the ways in which you are wrong — but not how to correct.
On authority:
You are the authority. Nobody can help you. Nobody else knows.
This is perhaps the most uncomfortable thing Phil says, because it closes every escape hatch. You can't outsource the decision to a teacher, a mentor, a gallerist, a follower count, or a market. You decide what's meaningful. You decide when it's done. You decide if it's good — and you live with the fact that you might be wrong.
It is terrible to be the authority, because nobody can help you. And it never stops. But it is also the best and most important thing.
My drawings are great. At least for me. Nobody else has to like them.
On being transactional:
Don't be transactional. Ever. Do it for your own reasons.
Phil returns to this idea more than any other. Don't make art for the sale. Don't make decisions for Instagram. Don't chase the approval of people whose opinion you didn't ask for. Being transactional confuses the noise for the signal. It corrupts relationships, and relationships are the only thing that exist.
I have made more money with rubbish than with things of real quality.
Everything is relationships. Not the objects. Not the product. The tension between them.
THU talks vs. Quarantine mentorships
If you've seen Phil at Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn, you've seen him at his most public -sharing a gallery space with Jeremy Mann and Nadezda, painting live, giving talks to hundreds of attendees from the entertainment and digital art industries. THU is built for inspiration at scale: you watch, you absorb, you leave charged.
Quarantine is built for something else entirely. It's not a conference. It's not about inspiration. It’s not networking. It's about DISMANTLING.
At Quarantine, for 45 minutes at a time, he is the only other person in the room with you and your painting. There is nowhere to hide. No crowd to dissolve into. No next talk to move on to. Just the work, the question, and whatever you've been avoiding.
The people who come to Quarantine have often already been to THU, to Rome Workshops, to Art Escape in Tuscany, to masterclasses, to residencies. They've absorbed all the inspiration available. What they haven't done is sit across from someone like Phil Hale while he looks at their canvas and says: "Open it up. You're going in the wrong direction. The signal is right there, and you keep painting over it."
That's not a talk. That's a fucking mirror.
Why Phil Hale keeps coming back
Phil is not a person who does things out of obligation or politeness. He described Quarantine as more art than he has ever talked about in his life, at the most basic, instinctive, necessary level. He's returning for a second edition not because he's paid to, but because -in his own words- the signal on the island is real.
I really believe — and this makes me a fool — that art connects you with something very, very fundamental and allows you to escape all the rubbish.
Everyone here is working in the same area. And even discovering what the problems are is like problem-solving. It's a rare opportunity.
Before I came here, I thought this was some kind of weird cult. But it's not. The signal on the island is real.
This is not a painting retreat
If you're looking for a retreat where Phil Hale demonstrates how he paints and you follow along, this is not your place. If you want a conference where a famous artist gives an inspiring talk and you go home fired up, this is not it. If you want someone to tell you your work is good, Phil is the wrong person to ask.
But if you suspect that your technique has become a wall, that your professionalism has replaced your relationship with the work, that somewhere between art school and now you stopped painting and started performing -Phil Hale is the kind of presence that makes that visible. Not by telling you. By being in the room while you discover it yourself.
It cannot be done directly. You cannot impose yourself. You cannot tell nature what to do.
The island does the rest.
→ Phil Hale at Beautiful Bizarre Magazine → Phil Hale on Instagram → Phil Hale at Trojan Horse Was a Unicorn
Phil Hale mentors at Quarantine Experiment #6: Tears in Rain. April 13–19, 2026. Lazaretto Island, Menorca.