2017-2018 Cutaways and Playing in the Ruins
In April 2017, I began working on larger canvases, giving myself more room to develop increasingly complicated compositions and the various stories taking place within them. My longstanding fascination with civil engineering, architecture and the inner workings of things led me back to the wonderful cutaway illustrations I had devoured as a child in comics and magazines such as Eagle and Look and Learn. I loved the way these drawings could remove the walls, roofs or outer shells of buildings and machines, revealing all the activity normally hidden from view. It seemed a particularly useful device for my own paintings, allowing me to explore several spaces and narratives simultaneously, often with little regard for conventional perspective or architectural plausibility.
Around this time, I also began developing ideas with fellow artist John Brown for a collaborative project provisionally called Playing in the Ruins. We shared an interest in town planning, architectural drawings, instruction manuals, retro-futuristic designs and the sometimes rather absurd ambitions of planners and engineers. These interests encouraged me to think about paintings as constructed worlds, somewhere between a diagram, a stage set and an imagined place. Looking back, this period marked an important shift towards the large-scale architectural narratives that have occupied much of my work since.
Robbie Bushe is represented by the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh.
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