Your work centres on the depiction of detailed, suggestive narratives, often pulling inspiration from the places in which you’ve lived and worked. Having been born in Liverpool, grown up in Aberdeen and now living in Edinburgh, are there any standout locations that you find yourself being drawn back to at this point of your career?  

I find inspiration in the places and spaces where I’ve lived, particularly in the houses, buildings, interiors, and streets that have been the backdrop to my life experiences. I have vivid memories from my childhood of Tornaveen in Aberdeenshire, with its rural farmland, rolling hills, forests, and challenging winter weather contrasted with short summers. My paintings serve as a way to capture the journeys I remember, such as bus routes and walks from my imaginative playgrounds during my early years. The characters I created and the stories I played out in my mind as a child often resurface in my painting. During my time as a student in Edinburgh, I lived in rented rooms in grand Georgian and Victorian flats, which provided the settings for my painted depictions of everyday life, capturing interiors, coffee mugs, lost loves, and excesses. Currently, I’m using Edinburgh as a backdrop to explore and process the global issues of populism, climate crises, and international conflicts. My interest has shifted towards cities and their complex infrastructural histories, merging my fascination with epic movie themes such as “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” and “Ben Hur.” I recently had the opportunity to revisit Liverpool, where I lived until the age of five, and surprisingly, I still feel connected to the streets and places from my early years. The art galleries and locations my parents took me to visit have had a profound and awakening impact on me.

Your father Fred Bushe was a sculptor and member of the Academy, your mother an art teacher and your brother now works as a painter. Could you tell us about what it was like to grow up surrounded by creativity, and the effect that had on your work?

Both of my parents were artists, and they always encouraged my siblings and me to express ourselves. Our home was often filled with our parents’ bohemian friends and colleagues, many of whom were artists, dramatists, and performers. At the time, it felt perfectly normal and not particularly glamorous. However, it could be embarrassing when my school friends discovered that my father created large abstract sculptures, especially the one displayed in the Aberdeen Art Gallery, right next to my school. There wasn’t much appreciation for contemporary art among my peers, and my school art teacher even raised an eyebrow at my father’s work and his outspoken newspaper letters about sculpture and architecture. Our house was always bustling with parties and social events, which was exciting to be a part of. My dad was a member of the notorious 1970s ‘Egyptologists’ group, which consisted of a group of Aberdeen male artists and lecturers who gathered once a month. The wives were expected to host while the gentlemen discussed art, philosophy, and culture. All I can recall is that the next day, the house would be in disarray with glasses, bottles, overflowing ashtrays, and the remnants of buffet food. However, the greatest gift my father passed down to me was the appreciation for the ability to draw and express ideas through any medium, be it a pencil, crayon, or anything else. I will always be incredibly thankful for what he instilled in me.

The cutaway is something you use often in your paintings, allowing the viewer to see through buildings and objects to view how things work. Are there any artists you’ve encountered over the years whose creative process you wish you could take a look inside of and investigate similarly?

As an art lecturer, I often delve into artists’ processes and starting points. There is a wealth of information and imagery available on contemporary practitioners and artists that is not exactly obscure. Frank Soltesz, renowned for his cutaway illustrations in America between the 1930s and 1960s, captivated my imagination with his depictions of the inner workings of buildings such as factories and hospitals during my childhood. These illustrations have since become my primary inspiration for depicting a variety of activities within a single painting. I believe that Edward Hopper, in many of his works, attempted to simultaneously reveal the interior and exterior by employing window devices as a means to explore both dimensions. If I were pressed to choose just a few artists whose inner workings and process I’d like to understand better, I would have to mention Hernan Bas for his ability to blend complex elements while maintaining expressive and free-flowing paint passages. Similarly, I’m eager to gain further insight into Jules de Balincourt’s seemingly effortless manipulation of scale changes while upholding a painterly swagger.

We were delighted to announce back in November that you had received the inaugural £20,000 RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award. What have you been working on since receiving the award?

I immediately delved into creating the two large paintings for the ‘Frontiers’ exhibition, which portray sections of Princes Street in Edinburgh. These pieces imaginatively speculate what the area might look like today and beyond if the proposed upper walkways and underground roads from the 1960s had been built. Currently, I am focusing on a series of smaller paintings tentatively titled ‘multi-stories’. These works delve into the inner life of individual rooms and their relationship to the surrounding buildings. Initially, my focus is on examining how people coexist within buildings, whether they are residential tenants, office workers, or retail employees. While this theme will certainly develop, I am also compelled to integrate my reflections on current events and global politics, and their impact on our local communities.

Frontiers: Painting in Scotland Now, which was curated by you and Flora La Thangue, is currently on view in the gallery. Could you tell us a bit about the experience of putting the show together?  

During my current career break, I had the opportunity to work on “Frontiers,” which has been really rewarding. Flora and I collaborated to create an exhibition celebrating contemporary Scottish painting from our unique perspective. The idea was too compelling to pass up, despite the potential challenges. We didn’t follow an extensive research approach, nor did we base our selections on established criteria such as critical acclaim or commercial success. Instead, we simply chose artists whose work resonated with us and would contribute to a compelling exhibition. The inclusion of several academicians and recipients of the RSA New Contemporaries adds an academic angle to the exhibition. Surprisingly, curating “Frontiers” has been relatively stress-free compared to previous shows I’ve organised. The title ‘Frontiers’ has sparked discussions on social media and among artists, evoking an intended sense of anticipation and excitement.

In your text for Frontiers, responding to the question ‘In a time when an artist can work in any media, why choose painting?’ you note that the act of painting has an intimacy you don’t find in other media. Do you think that’s why so many creatives continue to be drawn to the medium?

There’s just something about painting; it is elastic, it can crumble so quickly, and you can add paint and ruin it or save it in a second. In many other media, every action is reversible or with painting there is no ‘backspace’ or ‘delete’ button. Painting often means taking things away and putting it back together and reconstructing, fixing colour choices, and struggling with paint surfaces getting a little dead. It has been interesting reading many of the Frontiers artists’ responses to the question ‘Why do you paint?’. Many speak of its immediacy and tactile qualities allowing infinite possibilities. I’ll leave it at that.

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Here are a couple of the articles:

Incredible Edinburgh picture shows what city looks like with motorway through centre

By Donald Turvill  Local Democracy Reporter (below)

From www.Edinburgh Live.co.uk 

‘An award-winning painting depicting what Edinburgh would have looked like under a controversial plan to run a motorway through the city is to be purchased for the council’s art collection.

Showing a six-lane elevated ring-road tunnelled under Calton Hill and encircling the city centre, the piece is inspired by a vision for the capital’s future drawn up by town planners more than 70 years ago.

After being recognised as the ‘most outstanding view of the city in any media’ at last year’s inaugural Scottish Landscape Awards, Robbie Bushe’s 2023 artwork is set to be bought for the council-owned City Art Centre’s collection for £7,000.

The purchase is set to be confirmed by councillors on Friday, February 23, at a meeting of the Jean F Watson Bequest Committee, which acquires Scottish art for the city’s collection with funds donated by the late art enthusiast.=

The oil painting is based on the 1949 ‘Civic Survey and Plan for the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh’ which envisaged the construction of an inner city motorway, which have seen much of the historic Old Town demolished.

While some changes contained within the re-imagination of Edinburgh went ahead – including the construction of a city bypass – the more radical and contentious elements such as the city centre motorway depicted in Bushe’s work, the rebuilding of Princes Street and a freight railway under the Meadows were, were eventually scrapped.

Created by Patrick Abercrombie and Derek Plumstead, who were enlisted to help shape post-war Edinburgh, the ‘Abercrombie Plan’ stated: “A plan for Edinburgh must needs be a hazardous undertaking: there can be few cities towards which the inhabitants display a fiercer loyalty or deeper affection. Even its blemishes are venerated.

“The planner who dares to propose improvements must go warily.”

‘Towards St James and Calton Hill (reimagining the Civic Survey and Plan for the City & Royal Burgh of Edinburgh)’ is part of a series of panoramic paintings by the Liverpool-born artist responding to the survey.

A report to this week’s committee said: “This ambitious historical survey proposed dramatic changes to the topography of central Edinburgh, including a six-lane elevated ring-road encircling the Old and New Towns.

Discover Robbie Bushe’s captivating painting that envisions Edinburgh’s past with a six-lane motorway cutting through its historic core. Explore the intersection of art, history, and urban planning in this thought-provoking piece.

Rizwan Shah  21 Feb 2024 16:36 EST (below)

from bnnbreaking.com

Imagine the historic heart of Edinburgh, not as the quaint, cobbled streets we know today, but sliced open by a six-lane motorway. This isn’t a scene from a dystopian novel but a vision from the past, brought vividly to life by Robbie Bushe’s award-winning painting. In a remarkable blend of history and imagination, Bushe’s artwork, ‘Towards St James and Calton Hill (reimagining the Civic Survey and Plan for the City & Royal Burgh of Edinburgh)’, presents an Edinburgh that could have been, had city planners in the 1940s had their way. The painting, now poised to become a part of the City Art Centre’s collection, offers a striking commentary on the paths not taken in urban development.

The Vision That Never Was

In the aftermath of World War II, cities around the globe faced the monumental task of rebuilding. Edinburgh was no exception, with the ‘Civic Survey and Plan’ proposing radical changes to its cityscape. At the heart of this plan was a six-lane elevated ring-road, cutting through the city’s Old Town, a proposal based on the visions of Patrick Abercrombie and Derek Plumstead. These changes were aimed at modernizing Edinburgh, but they came at the cost of demolishing much of its historic core. Bushe’s painting captures this controversial vision with an uncanny precision, reimagining the city’s familiar landmarks overshadowed by concrete and traffic.

Bushe’s work, which recently clinched an accolade at the Scottish Landscape Awards, is not just a painting; it’s a portal to an alternate Edinburgh. The city council’s decision to purchase the artwork for £7,000, upon the recommendation of the Jean F Watson Bequest Committee, is a testament to the piece’s profound impact. It’s an acknowledgment of the fine line between preservation and progress that city planners tread, and a nod to the visions that shape our urban landscapes, even those that never come to fruition.

Art, History, and Urban Planning Intersect

The acquisition of Bushe’s painting by the City Art Centre is more than an addition to their collection; it’s a statement on the importance of reflecting on urban planning decisions. By immortalizing a moment in Edinburgh’s planning history that was never realized, the artwork invites viewers to ponder the implications of such transformative changes. It serves as a reminder of the delicate balance between development and the preservation of historical integrity. In doing so, Bushe’s painting becomes a crucial point of conversation in discussions about the future of urban planning and architecture, not just in Edinburgh, but globally.

As Edinburgh continues to evolve, Bushe’s artwork stands as a powerful symbol of the paths we choose and those we leave behind. It challenges us to consider the impact of our decisions on the cityscapes we cherish and the heritage we strive to protect. In capturing a vision of Edinburgh that never was, the painting also immortalizes a moment of reflection on the city that is—a city that, against the odds, managed to retain its historic soul amidst the pressures of modernization.

From Edinburgh

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We are delighted to announce Robbie Bushe RSA and Elaine Woo MacGregor as the recipients of two new awards funded by the RSA Blackadder Houston Bequest.

The £20,000 RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award intends to enable a committed painter to devote themselves exclusively to painting for a period up to 26 weeks. The inaugural recipient, Edinburgh-based artist Robbie Bushe’s practice centres on the depiction of detailed, suggestive narratives, frequently set within expansive architectonic constructions.

He intends to use the funds to embark on a speculative visual journey around the abandoned plans for an inner ring road in Edinburgh. Through archival research and improvisation, Bushe’s complex, large-scale panoramic paintings will playfully re-enact what the plans may have been.

Bushe said: ‘I am thrilled. Since graduating in 1990, I have covertly woven my art practice around intensive academic commitments. This opportunity to make work uninterrupted for an extended period is an absolute dream come true. John Houston was my studio lecturer in my fourth year at Edinburgh College of Art, which was also John’s last year of teaching. His quiet and paternal approach brought out the best in me, and his voice and advice have stayed with me over the last 30 or more years.’

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Robbie Bushe won the City of Edinburgh Award and £5,000 for his painting Towards St James and Calton Hill.

‘Towards St James and Calton Hill is part of an ongoing series that re-imagines Edinburgh had its 1949 ‘Civic Survey and Plan for the City & Royal Burgh of Edinburgh’ been realised,’ Robbie said.

‘It depicts a never built inner-ringroad slicing through Calton Hill.

‘I take a non-critical, non-judgmental view of planning, simply imagining and presenting what the city might look like today if plans had been implemented – what kind of society would have been built around different parts, what communities would have become slums because of it, or what would have brought industry.

CITY OF EDINBURGH AWARD – Robbie Bushe, Towards St James and Calton Hill (reimagining the Civic Survey and Plan for the City & Royal Burgh of Edinburgh)

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The 16 finalists were: Karolina Albricht, Robbie Bushe, Benjamin Deakin, Marcus Jefferies, Rich Jellyman, Lee Johnson, Allyson Keehan, Lee Maelzer, Melanie Miller, David Orme, Rosey Prince, Ellen Ranson, Claude Temin-Vergez, Emma Tod, Twinkle Troughton, Suzy Willey

The overall winner Rich Jellyman and my Highly commended prize was  announced at a private view at Huddersfield Art Gallery on Saturday 23 September, and was selected by three judges: Beth Hughes (independent Curator and Researcher), Caroline Walker (artist) and Grant Scanlan (Curator at Huddersfield Art Gallery).

The finalists were selected from over 1000 artists by a panel of four members of CBP, this year, Lesley Bunch (the winner of the 2022 prize), Gordon Dalton, Susan Gunn and Mandy Payne.

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ARTIST INTERVIEWS, JACKSON’S PAINTING PRIZE 2023

ROBBIE BUSHE: THE OTHERWORDLY EVERYDAY

Robbie Bushe won the Scenes of Everyday Life Award in Jackson’s Painting Prize this year with his work Night Visitor. In this interview, he discusses how his work has evolved since he last entered the prize, his sketching practice, and how he keeps his creative process fresh.

Josephine: As the winner of last year’s Landscape Award, as well as this year’s Scenes of Everyday Life Award, how has your work developed since we last spoke?

Robbie: I like to think my work as slowly evolving and I often work on several strands or projects concurrently and each develops in different ways. Last year’s landscape prize winner (Learney Incantation) was one of several ‘drone’s eye view’ larger paintings which I am continuing to do and was based on childhood memories or rural Aberdeenshire. This year’s ‘everyday life’ painting (Night Visitor) was one of a series of small paintings based on directly observed daily drawings from my garden which I added and invented a range of simple narratives within. So, development for me is not a linear thing as I juggle themes, subject, scale and purpose.

Josephine: We saw a sneak peek of your sketchbook displayed at the exhibition. Is sketching just as important to you as it was last year? Does this change depending on the project you work on?

Robbie: I usually have a least one sketchbook on the go, sometimes more depending on whether I have a specific project to keep separate. I am a drawing obsessive, and my sketchbooks work generally falls into three strands: directly drawn observations from everyday life, stream of conscious imaginative drawings usually done while at meetings or watching tv and compositional and preparatory planning of ideas. These books are an invaluable record of thought processes, reference, research, and aide to memory. I still have every sketchbook I have ever used; logged, dated, and sorted in my home office bookshelf. Dipping into any one of these, which stretch back to the early 1980s, is like conjuring up not just a memory, but also a sense of time, place, conversations, and personal perspectives at any given moment. They are all still recognisably me, and there are many themes I revisits again and again, often unknowingly – with a strong sense of narrative and storytelling at their heart.

Josephine: What materials or tools could you not live without? Do you use anything unconventional in your process?

Robbie: The first thing which comes to mind is strong kitchen roll paper towels – not very technical I know. Despite my detailed work, I am very messy painter, and to help with my control and dexterity I need a small piece of kitchen roll beside my palette after every brush stroke. I spend 10 minutes before every session cutting up each roll piece into 6 small pieces so as to not waste it. I am also fussy with the type of brushes I use for oil painting; My favourites are synthetic filberts sizes 0, 1 and 2. I tend to use either Jacksons own brand or Pro Arte. They have buoyancy and take a bit of punishment. I don’t think I use anything too unconventional – except I like to use watered down Gouache as an ink with a dip/scratch pen, as it allows me to use mix my own colours and tonal ranges.

Josephine: Night Visitor is much smaller in scale than your previous award-winning work, Learney Incantation (Tornaveen). You mentioned in your last interview with us that you first paint smaller works to prepare you for the big ones, as you move through the cycle of the project. Are you planning a larger version of this painting?

Robbie: I bought 20 small gesso-ed cradled panels from Jacksons to develop a series on. The small paintings are less studies for bigger work than a limbering up and getting a feel for a new direction or subject and see what works. They will rarely become studies for larger works, but may set the agenda, look and feel for bigger paintings. So, while I am not planning a larger version of Night Visitor, I am preparing for some bigger paintings which include some of the characteristics and ideas which have developed through the ‘Ghosts in the Garden’ series of which this work is one. These larger works are more likely to include greater expansive pictorial context and play more with perspective, viewpoint and sense of illusion.

Josephine: What’s your relationship with colour and how do you decide on the colour palette of a painting?

Robbie: I always used to think that drawing was my main strength and was the most important tool I had. Now I think it is my use and understanding of colour – and more importantly, its relationship with tone. This has been from a lifetime of learning, mixing, observing, and improvising with colour. I now give colour a huge consideration when planning or starting a painting. Sometimes I will create a series of ‘moodboards’ using collage materials to set the colour range, proportion of colour and tonal hues. Other times, particularly on smaller quicker works, I will decide on a dominant colour or a filter to keep the work as one. Whichever process, I now spend at least 30 minutes and sometimes up to 2 hours, mixing the principal colour values and tone and reflective variation on my palette. It is incredibly satisfying. I think we all have ‘go to’ colours and palette ranges, so I try to change it up regularly. My works often has dominant non-local colours like having a green sky and this adds to a sense of otherworldliness and detachment I try to achieve in my work.

Josephine: Your work last year was focused on urban landscapes – huge, sprawling, and detailed. Am I right in thinking that this year, your work appears to have zoomed into the details and now depicts individual, more personal scenes, perhaps connected to the previous works?

Robbie: Yes that’s right – I switch between the two. The garden paintings have mainly been made using reference drawings I make on location. So, they have a domestic human scale, whereas my panoramic works use tools such as Google Earth, archive photographs and a lot of conjecture and imagination. As I expand the garden paintings, I am playing again with spatial devices such as cutaways and excavations revealing what’s inside and underneath, and where my characters are. The places and narratives are deeply personal, visual daydreams, reflecting on forlorn memories and invented narratives.

Josephine: Which historical or contemporary artists have influenced you the most?

Robbie: Dudley D Watkins, who invented and drew the cartoon strips ‘The Broons’ and ‘Oor Wullie’ for the Sunday Post in from the 1950s until the 70s. His dip pen inkwork, multiple figure framed and linear perspective started it all for me. In terms of painters I could list hundreds but my current top ten would be (in no particular order) Pierre Bonnard, for the complex weaving and sprinkling of colour to find the composition, James Ensor, for his arresting imagination, Ben Shahn, for his playful depiction of New York life. Carel Weight, for their otherworldliness alongside Steven Campbell, Tal R, Hernan Bas, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Cecily Brown and Jules De Balincourt

Josephine: How long does a painting take, or does it depend on the subject? Do you work on multiple paintings at once?

Robbie: When I get going, I work fast. I have had to develop strategies to make work in the spaces and time between my academic and other work commitments. I actually have a short attention span and can only work in 2-3 hour bursts. So, I must plan carefully and usually have several works on the go at the same time. When I run out of energy and options on one work, I can move onto another. I build in preparation, colour mixing and ‘faff time’, but in order to have a successful session, I need to decide and plan in advance what passage of the painting I am going to work on. It’s essential for me, otherwise I may drift into self-indulgence and the painting with run away from me. I draw out my compositions thoroughly before painting and most of the experimentation occurs during the drawing stage. Get that right and then the painting has a fighting chance. So how long does it take me? On average a 50 x 60 panel will take around six 2–3-hour sessions from start to finish. However, I recently worked on three concurrent 155 x 170 cm canvasses which started in late October 2022 and were completed by end of February 2023. I have no clue on the number of hours as I also have a four day a week academic job and would also work on smaller works at the same time.

Josephine: How do you deal with artist’s block or moments of creative stagnation during the painting process?

Robbie: I’m pretty good at circumnavigating any kind of block; but it has taken me almost 40 years to figure out how. When an idea or strand of work becomes tired or formulaic you know it’s time to find something fresh and that’s a huge amount of pressure. But for me it is important not to go looking for the end goal, but to go back to some mechanical tasks. in 2021 I used the rebuilding period after my last solo show to make a new a new drawing every day directly observed from our maturing garden. I always create rules for myself and on this series, every drawing used the same media, size and approach and took no longer than 30 minutes – so it did not intrude on the rest of the day. This gets me looking again, visual daydreaming and not knowing the destination. I also use random collage elements as starting points for drawings – extending and adding from memory and imagination; it might me something from the news I have printed out, or one on of my own photographs, or from my endless archive images I collect. All this keeps me busy and thinking and eventually something gets under my skin, and I know its time to make some small studies which could lead to more resolved paintings.

Josephine: How was your experience taking part in Jackson’s Painting Prize’s first independent large-scale exhibition at Bankside Gallery?

Robbie: It was lovely to have a physical focus to the Jackson’s Painting Prize and good to meet some of the artists I have got to know via social media. I am very fortunate to have won a prize two years running so it has been good to see how the award has evolved and has become more professionally organised and received.

Published: 30th August 2023 by Josephine Zentner

Josephine Zentner

Josephine is the Art Prize and Gallery Coordinator at Jackson’s, which involves overseeing projects with artists and arts organisations; in addition to running our annual competition, Jackson’s Art Prize. She paints semi-surreal landscapes inspired by furniture design in acrylic and oil.

The post THE OTHERWORDLY EVERYDAY appeared first on Robbie Bushe.

Robbie Bushe won the Scenes of Everyday Life Award in Jackson’s Painting Prize this year with his work Night Visitor. In this interview, he discusses how his work has evolved since he last entered the prize, his sketching practice, and how he keeps his creative process fresh.

The post Jacksons Painting Prize 2023. Winner: Scenes of Everyday Life appeared first on Robbie Bushe.

12th October 2022 by Clare McNamara

Robbie Bushe won the Landscape/Cityscape/Seascape Award in the Jackson’s Painting Prizethis year with his work Learney Incantation (Tornaveen). In this interview, artist and previous winner of the same award, Sarah Bold, asks Robbie about his practice, materials and finding inspiration in 1970s science fiction.

Sarah: First of all, can you tell us how you came to be a painter?

Robbie: My dad was a sculptor (formal, metal and wood, a bit like Anthony Caro) and Mum did performance, design, poetry and much more – she was brilliant. I was always going to have the arts in my spirit and I could draw. In my early years, I used this skill to imagine the world through stories and characters. I devoured British comic books such as 2000AD and Judge Dredd in the late 1970s, as much for their team of talented young comic artists as the social political satires set in the near future. I was fascinated by their use of scratchy dip pens and bold black and white ink artwork. I developed my own style and soon was creating my own comic strips which traded at school for sweets. I was heading for art school to be a comic book artist. However, when I got to Edinburgh College of Art, there was no comic book artist course, just very conventional illustration, which I had no interest in. But this was the 1980s and making a lot of noise in the west at Glasgow School of Art were the new Glasgow Boys; Steven Campbell, Peter Howson, Adrian Wiszniewski, and Ken Curry. They made bombastic and surreal narrative figurative paintings which felt a bit like new comic book art writ large. I was green-eyed but hooked. I studied painting at Edinburgh, which at the time favoured a decorative colourist and close tone approach from the ghosts of Anne Redpath and William Gillies. So, my work evolved from the overtly graphic figuration tempered by subtle brushwork of neutral and muted colours.

Sarah: Drawing seems to be a very big part of your practice and the foundation of your painting. Can you tell us how the drawing for a painting starts and how does it develop into a painting?

Robbie: Drawing is the scaffold I need to hang my paintings on. I have a dexterity with a pen I can only dream of with a brush. It has taken me the last 30 years to realise that one can serve the other – like the spaces between the beats and notes in music. These days not all my painting evolve or arrive in the same way. However, when I am starting a new body of work or working on a set of new ideas, I will usually do much of the following: Collect, cut out and paste images from newspapers and magazines or printed off the internet which broadly reflect some of the ideas I am thinking about. For a while that has been sprawling urban infrastructures, but right now its energy supplies, pipelines, border crossings, invasions, popularism and gardens. I am interested in civil and social engineering as a contrivance for commentary in my work. I will paste these images randomly through a drawing book leaving lots of white space. Over time I open a page and draw around them joining them up, expanding them and inventing figures and stories. I do these best when I am almost daydreaming, at work meetings, watching tv or listing to a podcast. At the same time, I will be making observational drawings which may or may not connect with the ideas I am playing with but somehow, I will eventually allow them to submerge with what I have been thinking about. Right now, it’s my own garden which has become a creative stage set for my work. Eventually these drawings, mostly using fine liner pens, start to develop into compositional thumbnails drawings which could become small- or large-scale paintings. They give me confidence to improvise and riff off the ideas and motifs which seem the most compelling. Eventually I will pluck up the courage to start the building process of my paintings.

Robbie in his studio space, 2021

On my large-scale work this starts on sized canvas – rather than gesso primed. I like to start paintings using fine coloured pens for the armature-like exploratory drawing and sized canvas remains smooth enough for this, to help me build up a mesh of exploratory lines from lighter to darker tones as the drawing evolves. While it looks structural and detailed it is born from a free-flowing approach not dissimilar to how I improvise in my drawing books. I love what an expanded scale does to my images and spaces to create panoramas with complexity. It is only when I can see the whole image and have reference to each bit, whether it be a building, table, tree, or vehicle do I feel confident to start painting. It may be too simplistic to say that I proceed to ‘colour in’ the drawing but would be pretty accurate. I may often start with a specific colour palette in mind and somethings I will create a mood board to give me guidance on the colour, tone, and mood for the work. Next stage is deciding what passage I am going to paint and then spend up to an hour mixing up enough oil paint. If the range of colours and tones look good on the palette, they have a fighting chance of looking good in the painting. Colour balance and close tones is an important part my painting. So, drawing done, paint mixed – now I feel confident to paint. Despite the detail and complexity of my drawing, I cannot keep my hand still with a brush, but I have learned not to protect the drawing underneath and allow the paint to sit not quite in the right place. The viewer is always aware of the under-drawing, but it is this combination of line and paint which has allowed my work to develop and become distinctive for now – but my approach is always evolving.

Sarah: Will you do numerous drawings first or draw directly onto the canvas? What is your process?

Robbie: I am always drawing – mostly in my books but often on meeting agendas or notes for work. If there is a lot at stake as in a large work, I make numerous thumbnail drawings of possible compositions for an idea – seldom do these leading to a definitive one and I still prefer the discovery of drawing straight onto the canvas with a degree of improvisation.

A Scottish Goldmine, 2022
Robbie Bushe
Oil on canvas (in two panels), 140 x 260 cm | 55 x 102 in

Sarah: Do you have a preferred scale to work to and why this works best for you?

Robbie: It really depends on where I am in the cycle of a body of work. I recently completed a series of 14 small paintings. This allowed me to work on several at once, letting me work ideas out and allow one painting to help another. I have a short concentration span – I usually only paint in two-hour bursts – so this is a useful ploy at the start of series. Right now, I have four large canvasses ready to get start on for the winter. If I have planned it right and the ideas in the paintings mean enough to me and I have explored and researched thoroughly, then getting lost in these paintings over the coming months will be heaven. I like to know what my plan is when I arrive in my studio – just a hop out of my house into the garden.

John Moores entry work in Progress, 2019

Sarah: There is so much to see in your paintings, they are very absorbing. Can you explain about the narrative? Where do you get your inspiration?

Robbie: This has evolved quite a bit over the years. In my early career I was known more for paintings of large figures within domestic interiors or rural locations – often autobiographical, stories of my family, breakups, and broken dreams. But eventually I ran out reasons to make these works and they got a little irrelevant.
About ten years ago, having felt I had lost my focus as an artist, I set about rebuilding my practice and what I would make my work in response to. I started by ensuring I made a new complete pen drawing in my book every day. I did this and little else for a couple of years and nothing was off limits subject matter-wise. If I wanted to add a ‘Daleks into a Italian panoramic landscape’ I allowed myself. Some drawings were from life, often around the hills a cityscape of Edinburgh, others were from invented or remembered places where I could run riot with mining my own past and dormant interests. These included civil engendering, bridges, road structures and networks, cutaway illustrations of factories and ships (and space-ships). The more I dipped into my own memories the more I was able to reconstruct whole buildings and interiors space through my daily drawings, allowing myself the permission to follow and record all these trails. Eventually they came out in the paintings, but it took some time to figure out how and why, but it gave me far more visual tools and motifs to allow ideas and positions on the world to take shape.

Robbie with Stanley in his Studio.

Sarah: You have grown up in very beautiful Scotland, amongst many places. Does the Scottish landscape influence your work in anyway? Are your paintings specific to a single place or more of a collection of places?

Robbie: I have lived in Liverpool, Aberdeen, Aberdeenshire, Chichester, Hastings, Oxford and Edinburgh where I returned to in 2007. All have had an impact on the images in my work, but rarely do I make a work which is a specific location. I often see part of my job as a bit like a movie location hunter – find a place to tell a story or reveal an idea. There is no doubt that panoramas of Edinburgh, its hills, rocks and layered city, play a huge role in defining how I reveal space and distance.

The Road Builder, 2021
Robbie Bushe
Oil on canvas, 140 x 120 cm | 55 x 47 in

Sarah: Looking at your paintings is like peeling back a layer of skin, particularly the open houses. I have the feeling of peering through a window, almost on the sly – observing from a hidden space complex lives that feel both familiar and fairy-tale at the same time. Would you say that your paintings are similar to a biography of your life in some way? How much is from personal experience and reality compared to imagined?

Robbie: The peeling back comes from my renewed interest in the art of the ‘cut-away’ I became aware of in the pages of Look and Learn in the 1970s but harks back to engineering drawing through the industrial revolution to today’s industrial design virtualisations. The device allows me to show what is happening to the inside of buildings while revealing their context with the landscape or urban setting. I have so much fun with that, but when I started to paint from memory images of some of the many homes and locations, I have lived then it did become more autobiographical – not retelling stories and to take me back to places and add to the memory. The remembered and imagined become completely entwined. I found it cathartic to retrace steps and figure out the lay-out of a building I had once lived and getting it wrong is all part of the process, reshaping my memories.

Neanderthals Futures Infirmary, 2019
Robbie Bushe
Oil on canvas, 160 x 240 cm | 63 x 40 in

Sarah: You have mentioned 1970’s science fiction tv is sometimes a recurring theme – why is this so?

Robbie: I was obsessed with science fiction from the moment I hid behind the sofa from the yeti in Doctor Who the late 1960s. I devoured tv, film and comic books. It was the visuals, character and the monsters which I could draw, role play and get lost in my own world in rural Aberdeenshire in the 1970s. I would not have dared to introduce any hint of this my work in the early years of my career. It was only more recently that I started to mine my memories and early obsessions in my work. I never imagined the world would return in my lifetime to be such a volatile and unstable place. The politics of now and the sci-fi of my yesteryears seem good bedfellows to rehearse and reveal some of these ideas and my positions on them.

Youth Theatre, 2021
Robbie Bushe
Oil on canvas, 87 x 101 cm | 34 x 40 in

Sarah: Your work is very detailed, have you always painted in this way?

Robbie: I have developed the ability through my early comic book aspirations to draw quickly and be able to expand ideas over a page. Painting in this way came much later as I tried to find ways to enable to same dexterity. My brushwork was plodding and messy and I could never envision a way to get the kind of detail I can in my drawing. I would just settle for a clean edge and a sense of light. It took many years for my understanding on how to use and apply painting which complimented my drawing.

Tenement Alimentation, 2020
Robbie Bushe
Oil on panel, 100 x 81 cm | 40 x 32 in

Sarah: Many artists talk about happy accidents in the studio that come from experimentation. How do you experiment within the studio and if so what sort of thing will you try?

Robbie: I am always a bit wary on this one. Some artists talk about the ‘happy accident’ as if it is a deliberate part of their process. But the danger is that these accidents can feel contrived and without reason. I allow experimentation and playful wiggle room at each stage of my processes, but their needs to be a core rigour and purpose running though my work. Yes, sometimes things happen or occur during the process which is unexpected or unplanned and you have to make a decision whether to run with it or not. But it’s not an accident, it’s part of the process of making art – responding and adjusting.

The Blowtorch Incident (Tornaveen), 2021
Robbie Bushe
Oil on canvas, 101 x 87cm | 40 x 34 in

Sarah: Do you have a favourite colour palette that you return to? Favourite colours that you use most?

Robbie: I seem to always return to the Yellow, Ochre, and Grey Close tone palette as I find it calming and familiar – a haven when I am not sure of the composition. I actively try to extend my range and I do this using a mood board or following the colours from a photograph I have selected. I have become much more equipped and confident mixing colour over the years. I use prefer oils and I need to be able to spend a good hour colour mixing and enjoying the colour swatches appear on my palette.

Sarah: What do you find most challenging within your practice? What do you do if you feel a painting isn’t working? What do you enjoy the most?

Robbie: I work 4 days a week as an art lecturer at the University of Edinburgh so carving out enough time to make work is always my biggest challenge. I have learned way weave my practice around my life and work commitments and am able to take the opportunities of a free hour to draw or get to the studio. Little and often.

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Clare McNamara

As Blog Editor, Clare oversees content for the blog, manages the publishing schedule and contributes regularly with features, reviews and interviews. With a background in fine arts, her practices are illustration, graphic design, video and music.

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THROUGH most of the last year, we’ve all been forced to focus on the homes in which we live. How do we really feel about these places? Might art help us re-imagine them? Artist Robbie Bushe, shortlisted for the prestigious John Moores Prize, talks to Susan Mansfield about his work.

But this is no ordinary examination of “home”. These are houses opened up like architectural scale models, tenements without walls in which the miniature dramas of neighbours are played out in vibrant colour. There are real homes and fantastical ones, memories blended with works of imagination.

His years at Glenburn were a time when his imagination could run free, immersing himself in imagined stories enriched by comic books, Look & Learn Annuals and the sci-fi he loved on TV. He still remembers the day at Torphins Primary School when he slipped out of class and, looking in the mirror in the boy’s toilets, spoke to his adult self. “I don’t remember what we said, but I always remember that moment. It’s like an anchor, something you’d imagine in a British sci-fi kids’ TV series, which I would have devoured at the time. That moment was my introduction into being aware of timelines, looking back and looking forward.”

There are secret laboratories and underground factories, even (if you look closely) the occasional Dalek. One catalyst was the merger between Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh University in 2011, which meant Bushe – who runs the Short Course programme at ECA – had to relocate from the art school to the Centre for Open Learning.

The Robbie Bushe who looked in the mirror wanted to be a comic book artist. Each week he pored over the megacities of Judge Dredd in 2000AD. Both parents were artists – his father was sculptor Fred Bushe – so creativity was encouraged, but he couldn’t see a way into comics. “Even when I was applying for Edinburgh College of Art, there was no department where you could do that. If I had chosen Illustration at that time, I would have spent three years learning how to draw nice middle-class picture books of talking squirrels. But this was 1985 and, over in Glasgow, Steven Campbell and co were making huge waves with paintings which I thought looked like huge comic strips. Campbell was my cue to study painting and try, covertly, to make my comic strips as paintings. For a while, Anne Redpath and William Gillies won out as I developed a quiet, narrative, domestic, approach. In recent years, however, I rediscovered how to play and tap into my childhood obsessions and ambitions.” THE quiet interior scenes of his early work have now given way to much larger scale compositions. Outside and inside perspectives are combined. Buildings are opened up, like the cutaway illustrations of L Ashwell Wood for The Eagle. Stories play out against sprawling dystopian suburbs and cities which expand in three dimensions.

“It took a long time to adjust to that, I felt like I was being detached. I started to make a whole series of drawings of the main ECA building.

“Then I started working in the new building in Paterson’s Land near Holyrood, and started doing drawings of that area. I just got fascinated by it. I’m interested in civil engineering and excavation and very sculptural drawing, which I think I get from my father. I discovered I could paint over detailed drawings.”

For “Neoneanderthals”, a two-person exhibition at the RSA in 2019 with sculptor Jeanne Cannizzo, he again re-imagined aspects of Edinburgh. The show drew on recent Neanderthal research as well as aspects of fantasy and science fiction. In the painting Bushe entered in the John Moores Prize, “The Neanderthals Future Infirmary”, the city’s former hospital on Lauriston Place, opens up to reveal subterranean Neanderthal cloning chambers below ground.

While “Dwell” is more grounded in realism, there are some paintings in the show which have an allegorical or satirical quality. “Lost in the Supermarket” captures a frenzied moment in the early days of lockdown (“I went out to get toilet paper and this is what I came back and painted.”)

Other works show houses marooned in the rising floodwaters of melted ice caps or threatened by bush fires, “which is completely to do with where we find ourselves globally – there is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There’s a warmth running through the show, but there’s also an undercurrent which is questioning the way that we’ve lived our lives, particularly in the West. I think if I was to carry on this theme, that might be a direction I would work on”.

Susan Mansfield, The National, 19th April 2021

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