My friend of about eight years, artist Philippa Sutherland, died last month. She’d been ill for some time and I’d been visiting her weekly for a year. We weren’t close friends, and Philippa had many friends from different places, particularly Ireland where she lived for many years, but we found lots to talk about, books, films, art, and music, just some of Philippa’s interests. She was fiercely bright and well-informed, right until the end. Philippa hated having her photo taken, although she always maintained a stylishly cool look, and I always checked with her first before posting anything on social media. Here are a couple of Instagram posts from the past which show Philippa in her studio at Drawing Projects UK in Trowbridge and include some images of her beautiful work.
When I was working on my poetry collection What Are You After? (Nine Arches Press, 2018) I met with Philippa to discuss a possible cover. In the end, after discussions with my editor Jane, we decided on an image by a different artist (my friend Mary Petrovska) but Philippa gifted me her painting and it’s been on my sitting room wall ever since. Philippa especially loved it when I told her my daughter, a teenager at the time, really liked the painting. Philippa was always interested to hear about my two children. She’d been an art tutor for many years and always cared about young people. She never seemed old and was one of those consistently young at heart and in spirit people.
Philippa is my second friend to die this year, and her funeral will be the third I’ve been to this year. I suppose this will happen more and more as I grow older. Like my friend Pauline Scott-Garrett, I had the strange experience of reading WhatsApp messages from Philippa after she’d died. In some ways it was lovely to read through our chats and remember some of our shared experiences. I will miss Philippa, as I still miss Pauline, but her life was diminishing as she grew more ill, and I was able to see her the day before she died and she had a gentle death, in the company of loving friends. I thank God for that.
The funeral will take place on Thursday 24th July 2025 at 2pm, Westbury Cemetery Chapel, Bratton Road, Westbury, BA13 3EB.
Death notice and condolences page from Ireland here.
Josephine Corcoran 
I appreciate your spate of funerals, but what a talent, what a loss.
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Thanks for saying this, Michael. Philippa would have loved that x
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