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Artist Exhibitions:
'people and faces' UCL 1964
Oxfordshire Artweeks 1997-2002
'people and places' Banbury
Museum 2000
'Transformations' Chipping
Norton 2000
ARTitUK Pangbourne College,
Berkshire 2001
Friends of Pitt Rivers Museum
2001
'Quintessential' The Theatre
Chipping Norton 2002
'Hotwired' The Mill Arts
Centre, Banbury 2002
The Lennox Gallery, London SW6
2002
Gallery...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
A selection of Colin's shoe
prints may be seen and bought
at
Icetwice Gallery, 25 High
Street South, Olney, MK46 4AA
http://icetwice.com/
...
Further Information
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Artist Reviews:
Coming Soon!
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Collections:
Coming Soon!
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Commissions:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Statement for Colin Robinson
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In the wake of Duchamp et al, the 1960s' pop artists blew away much of the established rule book about what constituted 'art' – I took heart. I am not comfortable with artificial categories such as fine art, graphic art, or craft. In the plane of two-dimensional imagery, I guess I'm now somewhere between photography, graphics and the digital arts. Pixel technology suits my thinking and my range of skills; I have been described as a polymath. Technology and art are inseparable, each sparking off ideas in the other. Artists have always been quick to exploit new technologies, materials and tools (Dürer and the printing press; Vermeer and the camera obscura; Degas and high speed photography; Paolozzi and screen-printing; Donaldson and acrylic paint; Hockney and Polaroids; Hamilton and the electronic Quantel Paintbox).
For me, new art has to be original. I believe the product says something about the artist, if only that he/she was kowtowing to the establishment or prostituting their talents or just needing to earn a crust. How the viewer interprets the artefact is another matter; the artist has limited control over that. Essentially art comprises the acts of conceiving and executing the artefact for others to behold and judge.
What I bring to my work can only comprise my experiences, my feelings and aspirations, my imagination and fantasies, my limited but precious resources (45 years of negatives, slides, drawings, books, cuttings and notes) and my accumulated skills (film, television, photography, editorial, IT, basic draughtsmanship, et al). Whether anyone actually likes what I produce doesn't really matter.
To bring an idea to fruition (and some of my ideas have been in note form for many years), my production process still starts n the scanner or in the camera, with on-going creative decision-making, choice of camera settings and lens, point-of-view, framing and the 'moment' of exposure. But for me, that is only the start. In a sense, the resulting negative is a template for painting just as the original camera obscura was used, or one component of a collage. The camera does not lie, but it certainly is economic with the truth. It is selective, leaving out whatever the angle of the lens did not cover, whatever happened immediately before and after the moment of exposure; maybe it omits or distorts the colour content; certainly it does not capture the sound nor smell. It is impossible, even for an unadulterated photo, to be completely objective and the viewer's interpretation is of course subjective. Digital manipulation allows me to augment the image beyond the 'truth'.
While my pictures tend to have recognisably photographic provenance, I allow the photographic and computer and painting processes – and serendipity – overtly to affect the results. Rarely now I do leave some of my photos as shot but, just as I used to discover previously unnoticed elements of a picture under the darkroom enlarger and in the chemicals' dish, now I explore what is revealed on the computer screen. It can be can developed pretty well as I wish. Collages from several negatives and drawings have become the norm. The art of the 60s remains a seminal influence on my more recent work.
Raking over my past and my collections, I am making connections and crystallising my ideas. I'm not the first to make analogies and to discover the commonalities between the branches of arts and crafts and to be stimulated by them. Increasingly I find that I am confronting and analysing my own personality and sexuality, distilling what I find and seeking to express it. I am exploring and expressing my emotions. Is this it?
© Colin Robinson 2008
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contact artist
