Introduction

Robbie Bushe RSA (b. 1964, Liverpool) is an Edinburgh-based painter whose intricately composed narrative paintings explore imagined architecture, constructed environments, memory and the sometimes absurd systems that govern contemporary life. His work frequently takes the form of elaborate architectural cutaways, revealing the interiors of buildings, cities and social institutions populated by characters caught up in overlapping stories and events. Drawing on influences ranging from science fiction and comic art to architectural illustration, his paintings combine observation, invention, humour and an occasional sense of impending catastrophe.

Raised in Aberdeenshire, Bushe studied Drawing and Painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1990. He has exhibited widely across the UK, with recent solo exhibitions at the Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh, and Irving Gallery, Oxford. His work has received numerous awards, including the inaugural W. Gordon Smith Painting Prize (2017), a prize at the John Moores Painting Prize (2021), the RSA Houston Blackadder Mid-Career Painting Prize (2023), and the City of Edinburgh Prize at the Scottish Landscape Awards (2023). He was also Highly Commended in the Contemporary British Painting Prize in 2023.

Alongside his painting practice, Bushe has had a long career in arts education, including teaching and leadership roles at several UK art schools and universities, most recently as a Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. In August 2025, he took voluntary severance to concentrate on painting full-time, undertaking artist residencies at the Hugo Burge Foundation in the Scottish Borders and Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh.

An elected Royal Scottish Academician since 2017 and a member of Contemporary British Painting since 2023, Bushe has also contributed extensively to arts leadership and exhibition-making. He was President of Visual Arts Scotland (2013–16), Secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy (2018–21) and Chair of its Exhibitions and Events Committee (2022–25). He has curated and co-curated major exhibitions, including Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now at the RSA in 2024.

His work is exhibited through galleries and institutions across the UK, including the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh, Thompson’s Gallery in London and Aldeburgh, and Irving Gallery in Oxford.

Robbie Bushe is represented by the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh.

I’m a narrative painter drawn to imagined architecture, social infrastructure and the entanglements of memory. My work reimagines places and tells visual stories that are layered, cinematic and often speculative. I build detailed compositions that cut through buildings, homes and cities like diagrammatic slices, revealing people going about their private rituals and public lives.

These ‘cutaways’, inspired by old comics, textbook diagrams and science fiction cinema, allow me to merge timelines, compress space and play around with collective and personal memory.

I paint from a place of curiosity, improvisation and an often rather obsessive attention to detail. While much of my earlier work focused on domesticity and modern family life, I now operate on a bigger stage, creating expansive urban fictions drawn from civic histories, planning disasters, dystopian daydreams and the peculiarities of everyday life.

Drawing is central to everything I do. My sketchbooks go back to the 1980s and are full of ideas, observations and visual meanderings, many of which eventually find their way into paintings. I tend to work in bursts, often juggling several canvases at once, building up layers of paint, revising and occasionally obliterating passages as the compositions develop.

I enjoy the tension between control and chaos, between the carefully constructed architectural section and the rather less predictable business of applying paint.

The characters in my paintings are mostly invented, but their worlds borrow from places I’ve lived, including Liverpool, Aberdeenshire, Chichester, Oxford and Edinburgh, and from the lives I’ve glimpsed through windows, from passing buses or in tenement stairs.

Ultimately, for all the stories, ideas and elaborate constructions, it’s the act of painting itself, layered, physical and absorbing, that keeps me going.