Common Ground at the RWS Gallery, London
October 10-20, 2024
Lago de Carezza, II, Dolomites, 28 x 35 cm Falling Rocks, Pyrénées, 29 x 39 cm
Robin Richmond, September 12, 2024
I am a landscape painter, and my work is about the spirit of place. I travel the world – and probably as a result of my peripatetic upbringing – I am a restless vagabond. But my work is made in my two studios, one in rural France and one in central London. I work from memory, and from small studies in watercolour that I make from direct observation of nature. My painting is grounded in the very real experience of being in a particular place at a particular time, in a particular season and in a particular light. I like weather. All weather. I also like walking and painting in the mountains, and in this show I’ve included paintings that came to life in many different countries. Since the pandemic I am back on the road. I’ve included paintings of the Massif Central near to where I live in France, the Spanish Pyrenees over the border, the Italian Dolomites and more recently, the Cordillera de Talamanca in Costa Rica and the Sierra Madre del Sur in Mexico.
Titles are very important.
Since my last London show in October 2022, I have been preparing for this exhibition Common Ground at the new Royal Watercolour Society Gallery, which sits, very elegantly indeed, on Whitcomb Street, off Trafalgar Square. My co-conspirators are Frances Hatch, Caroline McAdam Clark and Linda Saul. We are all friends and members of the Royal Watercolour Society.
The gallery sits next to one of my favourite places in the world, London’s National Gallery, where I hang out whenever I’m stuck with my work. The consolations of great art are healing, and I spend a lot of time in this building and have done since my first year as an art student at Chelsea in 1970. I still have my student copy of Margaretha de Geer (1661) by Rembrandt. It took a month and made me both brave and also immune to the stares of passersby and their often hilarious commentary. A force field is a useful tool for an artist. One has to be vulnerable in order to create something but be simultaneously invulnerable to criticism. A paradox I am still working out after being a professional artist for over five decades.
This new space on Whitcomb Street, designed by John Nash over 200 years ago for the original RWS, Britain’s oldest art society, has been gloriously reinvented by WilkinsonEyre Architects, and it is impressive. It boasts beautiful lighting, sensitive proportions, a welcoming vibe and room for paintings to breathe.
About a year ago, the four of us Common Grounders discovered how well our work sits together. We all share a profound interest in nature and landscape painting and were keen to move out beyond the remit of our regular RWS shows at the Bankside Gallery, which only shows work in water-based media on paper. Here, at Whitcomb Street, we have incorporated oils, canvases, and mixed media into our show.
I am a little bit ashamed to say that my carbon footprint has been rather heavy in the last few years, especially since the pandemic. Spirit of Place is my subject. Genius Loci as the ancient Romans called it. I never work from photographs and am interested in how memory distorts experience. So, paintings about being in Japan, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Spain, Mexico, Costa Rica, Chile and my beloved bit of heaven in France Profonde feature in this show.
Since the Curwen Gallery, my home for over 20 years, closed its doors, I have felt hugely bereft, but also strangely liberated. Closely followed by the pandemic, this rupture of my normal artistic life (one-woman shows every two years) I have felt a change come over my work. After becoming allergic to oil paint many years ago, I began to work in acrylic on canvas. But I have always loved the surface of paper and have found a responsible, archival way to reduce paper to its molten pulp state and bond it to canvas or wood or even to other paper as a support.
I don’t consider these new paintings to be collages, as that term is too reductive. I think of them more as assemblages, as I paint over the shards of joined paper pieces with many layers of painted glaze. My influences are various. I see the Matisse cut-outs that hung in my childhood bedroom. A visit to Japan introduced me to the art of kintsugi in my use of gold leaf. I see medieval painting and the Roman mosaics of my childhood in the tessellated pieces of paper. I have slept under an Amish patchwork quilt since my early childhood in Pennsylvania. I even see that.
Wordsworth describes poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”.
That works for me as a definition of being a painter.
