-Birth year: 1969
-Nationality: American
-Birthplace: Camp Springs Maryland
-Based in: New York City
-Gender: Male
Philip Swan is a self-taught painter exploring the way viewers unconsciously interpret abstraction through free association, engaging with shapes, colors, lines and textures in ways that draw on memories and emotions inspired by, but in no way determined by, the memories and emotions of the artist who created the work. His paintings, mainly oil on canvas, are self-contained, but connected through color and compositional similarity. In the process of creating work, Swan conceives of compositional and aesthetic roadblocks and then improvises his way to a solution while avoiding resolving problems concretely, thus allowing previous stray pathways which eluded resolution to remain visible. The resulting pentimento gives the work its complex composition. Influences include painters Amy Sillman and Charline von Heyl.