Gasping

Description

Robert’s work is dominated by traditional painting themes such as colour and space, but he always takes these traditional themes and twists them into a more contemporary place. He’s always admired artists such as Patrick Heron and Braque and the impressionists for their use of colour, but he didn’t just want to recreate what they did, he wanted to move their ideas forwards. He was inspired by the rock band The Jesus and Mary Chain who wrote pretty « Beach Boys » like pop songs but then covered them with noise, distortion and feedback. In a similar fashion Robert aims to take the essence of colourful « Patrick Heron » like paintings, but to add into them a contemporary sense of chaos, distortion and feedback. Sometimes Robert covers his painting with his black and white Distortion Forms, a metaphor for the noise and feedback and distortion used by the Jesus and Mary Chain, and sometimes the paintings reach another point of visual ‘sound’ and freneticism without the Distortion Forms, such as in this painting. In all his work the resulting paintings relate to the act of seeing with the freneticism of some sections of the paintings referencing visual experiences like looking at branches of trees as they shake in the wind. The aim is always to let the viewer see more colour, more light, in essence see more in the world.