robyn hobbs's Page

Check out my new handmade jewellery!
I will be in Jazz in the park-pontypool in the craft tent on Sat 6th and Sun 7th Sept.

Also check out the New Exhibition in Victoria Gallery-Pontnewydd, Cwmbran.

I will be exhibiting my recent work alongside the works of my parents Jill and David Hobbs and my sister Bryony Hobbs.

For dates see poster in my images.

Robynx

Artist's Statement to accompany recent Grass Lands studies body of paintings.

This series of Watercolour paintings presents a contemporary analysis of the genre of landscape painting. Traditionally landscape paintings have taken the form of a cross section of a chosen scene, including a foreground, middle ground and background. These landscape paintings are usually specific to an area and have a very defined sense of place; the “ Simple and monumental style” of the Welsh artist Kyffin Williams (1918-2006) mainly concentrated on the mountain scenery of Snowdonia and a direct observation of it and its inhabitants. Williams’ work helped to stereotype the Welsh landscape and it is argued that Williams’ paintings were popular because he confirmed the nostalgia in Wales surrounding the landscape.

Many Welsh artists choose to represent the stereotypical views of Wales’ mountainous valleys, and to proclaim their Welshness, but I find an affinity with the Welsh painter Glyn Jones, who wrote, “If one is confident of their Welshness they do not need to proclaim it”. My landscapes are primarily Welsh in origin and rather than presenting the viewer with a panorama, they delve into the roots and soil of the landscape, and explore the organic network that it consists of. My paintings primarily consist of grass type landscapes, as such forms are easily recognised as organic or associated with the landscape and are better suited to my painting style. Perhaps though I am unintentionally expressing my Welshness through the very exploration of Welsh landscape, as the Cuban artist Anna Mendieta so aptly put it “I have thrown myself into the very elements that produced me”.

The main ingredient in the make up of my landscape paintings is the altering of the traditional landscape format; my paintings are painted in portrait, which I believe immediately removes them from the traditional panoramic landscape. The second being that my landscapes are close-ups of the topography of Wales and so we are removed from the comfort zone of our familiar surroundings, the painting is no longer a photographic memory of a place, it is a continuation of my thought processes upon being confronted with the landscape, it is the feeling felt and the colours experienced. The painting becomes anonymous or abstract through this process of magnification. As a consequence of this process my landscapes have become very much about mark making, colour and form, perhaps influenced by the intentionally incongruous mark making found in the works of the painter Gillian Carnegie, whose paintings Section (2005) and series of Black paintings of night-time landscapes serve to confuse our perception of space by planting a landscape at its heart.

Because the landscape is not specific to a particular place, it becomes important to provide an experience of the landscape, and so the painting becomes much more about process; the layering of colour, light and tone, and the interaction of this with the network of shapes and forms that constitute the landscape, very much influenced by the “subtle spatial complexity” and “line based gestural abstractions” found in Brice Marden’s ink and Gouache paintings. My brushstrokes have become more fluid and free and more in touch with the nature of the paint I am using, often incorporating unexpected drips of paint. The paintings present a whole experience rather than a preview, the experience then does not finish at the viewing of the painting. The methodology behind my landscape is thus a large contributing factor to the medium of watercolour in which I choose to paint my landscapes. Although this medium is often associated with the traditional landscapes mentioned, watercolour enables me to layer transparent films of colour, and to suggest, though its fluidity, the organic growth of nature.