Stephen Phillis currently lives and paints in Maldon, in Central Victoria. He was born is Scotland in 1947 and studied at Newport Art College, South Wales, UK. He won the City of Cardiff Art Prize. From there he has moved on, arriving in Australia in 1965. He began as an impressionist-expressionist painter in oils and acrylic, depicting old towns, buildings and landscapes, and now has a fresh, figurative/semi-abstract style of his own.

His most recent work shows a stylistic change to a figurative/semi-abstract format that allows him the latitude of exploring his skills as a draftsman, informal brushwork and unusual approach to dramatic spatial colouring. Although no event or place depicted is photographically accurate, there is an acknowledgement of seeing the familiar, the customary, and yet all is somehow verdant, unorthodox, askew.

His work is represented in Castlemaine Regional Gallery; Sale Regional Gallery; Philippines National Gallery, Manila; Water Board of New South Wales; Monmouth County Art Gallery; P&O Shipping Company Collection; Frau Munz Collection, Stuttgart, Germany, private collections in Australia and the UK and the Castlemaine Art Gallery.

He exhibits regularly at Manyung Gallery, Mt Eliza, Victoria, Gallery Sorrento, South Yarra Gallery and many more.