Both residencies allowed me to work on a much larger scale, developing increasingly elaborate constructed environments, architectural spaces and imagined narratives that explore the peculiarities of contemporary life, social structures and the ways we organise ourselves. Having sustained periods of uninterrupted studio time also allowed ideas to develop in ways that had often been difficult alongside teaching.

These two years have also seen a growing programme of solo and group exhibitions across the UK, including shows in Edinburgh, Oxford, London, Suffolk and Glasgow, alongside new gallery relationships and opportunities. Perhaps the biggest change has been the simple pleasure, and occasional uncertainty, of being able to organise my days entirely around making paintings rather than fitting them into the gaps between teaching commitments. This page brings together some of the paintings, drawings, sketchbooks, exhibitions and studio activity from this rather liberating new chapter.

I then turned my focus to the complexities of urban living—delving into multi-level living spaces amid pressing contemporary issues such as climate change, the rise of populism, and a growing sense that we are sleepwalking into a much worse future. Today, our homes are more connected than ever, yet they have increasingly lost their role as shared sanctuaries. With everything from entertainment to essentials delivered to our doorsteps, we often overlook the climate crisis fueled by our relentless pursuit of convenience, out-of-season foods, and fossil fuels.

Despite living in close proximity, we find ourselves more isolated than ever—sleeping mere inches away from neighbors we barely know. My work seeks to expose this disconnection, revealing the hidden layers of life within apartment blocks and urban infrastructures as if tearing down a ‘fourth wall.’ Through layered compositions, balanced tones, and shimmering brushwork, I invite viewers to reflect on our collective situation, offering both a critique and a glimmer of hope.

‘Ghosts in the Garden’ is an ongoing project.. From May 2021 I made an observational drawing from our home garden each day as a participant in ‘100 Day Droject Scotland’. These drawings formed the starting point of a series of animations and paintings culminating in a solo exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in April 2024.

A range of recent projects and exhibitions:

 

‘Dwell’ is a body of work exploring personal history and living spaces. It begun in 2018 from an indelible childhood memory of Bushe’s from 1975 in Aberdeenshire. It tells of his childhood, coming of age, loss, grief and adult responsibilities from the early 70s to the present, his paintings allowing us to peer in and speculate those shadows, figures and murmurs from the past.

A selection of this work forms part of an exhibition in April 2021 at the Open Eye Gallery.

Neo-Neanderthals is a collaborative project between artists Robbie Bushe and Jeanne Cannizzo making imaginative use of the scientific data on the physical and cultural inheritance left to us by the Neanderthals. Their popular image since the first fossil finds in the 19th century has been of hairy, low-browed, unintelligent beings incapable of symbolic thought who, perhaps deservedly, were killed by invading humans. In 2010 that picture was overturned by DNA discoveries which revealed that Neanderthals and modern humans had at some point interbred.

The exhibition is a cross-medium experience including painting, drawing, sculpture and animation and celebrates the improvised and ‘hand-made’, the ‘lo-fi’ and the deliberately gauche or awkward. While acknowledging there are parallels with current pressing problems in the wider world, the exhibition’s optimism about humanity’s collective ability to survive comes alive through the artists’ chimerical creatures and subversive drawings and animations.

In April 2017 I started working on a larger scale on canvas, which allowed me to create and play with every more complex compositions. My fascination with civil engineering lead me to rediscover the art of the ‘cutaway illustration’ I used to devour in boys comics such as Eagle and Look and Learn which allow the viewer to have a look into an otherwise solid opaque object.. The use of this device also forms part of the basis of a collaboration with artist John Brown called ‘Playing in the Ruins’. John and I are looking at ways to combine our interest in playful pictorial explorations of town planning documents, instruction manual, retro prototypes and .reconstruction.

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

2016 got off to an extraordinary start as I won the inaugural W Gordon Smith painting award at the Dovecot Studios Gallery. I presided over two successful Visual Arts Scotland exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy and  I was part of ‘Ghostlands‘ at the Tatha Gallery with Kate Downie and Ronald Plowman. I continued to develop my drawing as a means of visual meandering and improvisation which increasingly focussed on civic structures, institutional barriers and personal loss. These lead to a series of  oil paintings which show huddles of characters who are contained, locked in or shut out; some willing victims, others fighting injustices – forming the heart ‘Invasions and Excavations’ a solo exhibition at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh in April 2017.

In early 2014 My partner Catharine Davison and I moved to Oxgangs where we converted the garage into a studio. Oxgangs is  situated between the Pentland Hills, The Braid Hills, Blackford Hill, Firhill and Craiglockhart hills and these vistas (plus a holiday to Abruzzo Italy) of houses, hills, gardens and water have fueled my obsessive visual meanderings of vast spaces, some real and some invented. A new preoccupation placing sci-fi characters from the 1960s and 70s just seem to make sense.

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

In August 2011, Edinburgh College of Art was merged with the University of Edinburgh. What this meant for me was that the short courses department I coordinated at ECA was closed and its course programme were brought under management of University. This was a long and painful process where histories, legacies and procedures clashed. This subject became the catalyst of an outpouring of manic drawings as ideas developed and changed my approach to picture making.

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