Carol Robertson submitted 2 beautiful arcs to the AoaPC secret auction in 2015. They were extremely successful and we reproduced them for our Best of Art on Postcard show curated by Jealous.
BM - For those that might not know, please explain who you are and what you do.
CR - I’ve lived and worked in London since completing an MA at Chelsea School of Art in the 1980’s. Primarily I’m an abstract painter working with geometric formations, but I also make a lot of prints and watercolours.
BM - Have you always been creative?
CR - Yes… I was always interested in making visual things; I was always painting and drawing. When I was seventeen I lived in Paris and went to life drawing and still-life classes. It gave me a formal discipline, a trained eye to look and convert what I see into two dimensions. Drawing from life is a useful tool in training the eye and the hand: it encourages a closer continuity. During my Foundation year at art school I found the pictorial world was not the world I wanted to make art about. Since then I’ve been a steadfastly non-figurative artist but I don’t feel my work is disconnected from the real world.
It’s the colour in my paintings that has always been most closely aligned with the world around me, feeding directly back into the work.
"Colour adds personal stories: it’s like music, a fast-track to our emotions. I use it to summon things both seen and felt. It can reference almost anything.”
BM – You use a lot of geometric forms in your work, can you please tell the readers what they represent?
CR - Living within the geometric logic of a city space I see every kind of geometric formation, circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, grids etc. I work with them all but with circles and arcs of circles most frequently. Circles more universal, more symbolic than any other geometric formation. Of course we find them in architecture, but they take on many symbolic references.
“ Geometry allows me to concentrate on the essential. It gives me the freedom to channel sensory or poetic material and it takes the chaos out of what would otherwise be an impossibly vast set of visual options to pin my existence upon. The circle is the purest and most archetypal geometric form. It has a universal resonance, so frequently found in art, architecture and ritual. It’s an evocation of the universe and the heavens, the journey inward or outward to the centre: a symbol of wholeness, completion and infinity, the unbroken line with no beginning or end, the eternal cycle.” CR
BM - What made you want to get involved with Art On A Postcard?
CR - The Hepatitis C Trust is a charity I support. As an artist, donating work is a good way of getting involved.
BM - What other exciting things are you working on at the moment?
CR - I’m working with triangles!
BM - Where can we find out more about your work?
CR - you can go to my website
or visit Flowers Gallery website
The Arcs are available from Jealous Gallery . Art on Postcard will have them with them at Art Car Boot Fair at The Jerwood Gallery, Hastings on 16 July.
About the writer
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Benjamin Murphy is an artist who primarily creates delicate figurative works using black electrical tape. As well as this, he regularly writes about contemporary art. He lives and works in London. |