Introduction
Robbie Bushe RSA is a Scottish-based painter known for his intricately composed, narrative-driven artworks that combine fiction, memory, and urban architecture. His large-scale paintings often depict cross-sectioned cityscapes and tenement blocks, populated with improvised characters and unfolding vignettes, drawing on influences from sci-fi cinema, comic art, and the cutaway techniques of vintage illustrators.
Born in Liverpool in 1964 and raised in Aberdeenshire, Bushe studied Painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1990. His work has been exhibited widely across the UK in both solo and group shows and has earned numerous national awards, including the Guthrie Medal (1997), the inaugural W. Gordon Smith Painting Prize (2016), a prize at the John Moores Painting Prize (2021), and the Highly Commended Award at the Contemporary British Painting Prize (2023). He was awarded the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award in 2023 to support the creation of eight new large-scale paintings.
In parallel with his artistic practice, Bushe has had a significant academic career. He has held teaching roles at Gray’s School of Art, Kent Institute of Art and Design, Oxford Brookes University, and was Head of Fine Art at the University of Chichester. Since 2007, he has taught at Edinburgh College of Art and is currently a Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He was President of Visual Arts Scotland (2013–16) and served as Secretary of the Royal Scottish Academy (2018–21), where he remains an elected Academician.
Robbie Bushe is represented by the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh.
About my work
I’m a narrative painter drawn to imagined architecture, social infrastructure, and the entanglements of memory. My work reimagines places and tells visual stories—layered, cinematic, and often speculative. I build detailed compositions that cut through buildings, homes, and cities like diagrammatic slices, revealing people in their private rituals and public lives. These ‘cutaways’—inspired by old comics, textbook diagrams and sci-fi cinema—let me merge timelines, compress space, and riff on collective and personal memory.
I paint from a place of curiosity, improvisation, and attention to detail. While my early work focused on domesticity and modern family life, I now operate on a bigger stage—creating expansive urban fictions that draw from civic histories, planning disasters, dystopian daydreams, and traces of the everyday. I use drawing obsessively—my sketchbooks go back to the 1980s—and work fast in bursts, often juggling multiple canvases. I like the tension between control and chaos, between a tightly planned section and a looser, more instinctive brushstroke.
The characters in my paintings are mostly invented, but their world borrows from the places I’ve lived—Liverpool, Aberdeenshire, Chichester, Oxford, Edinburgh—and the lives I’ve glimpsed from a passing bus or a tenement stair. Ultimately, it’s the act of painting itself—layered, physical, absorbing—that keeps the engine running.
Robbie Bushe is represented by the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh and work is also available at RISE:ART