Tom Robinson ‘Night Swimming’

 

ML It’s a great title Tom – what inspired “night swimming”?

TR For the past few winters I’ve been walking and swimming on the North Norfolk coast at the full moon with some friends.  The colour of the shingle, water, flesh, and the blackness of the sky and the bright disc of the moon, together with the coldness, has been very affecting.   The painting isn’t a representation of this experience, but the title feels timely and appropriate.

ML I guess when it is dark we notice lines and shape even more. That seems to be a theme of this body of work?

TR I’ve become really interested in movement, and how things transition in painting.  I think this relates to my feeling that we experience colours and shapes primarily as forces.  By force I mean the purely visual response you get in looking at something, the physical feeling it gives you, similar to the auditory sensation received hearing a musical note.  It seems astonishing to me that we possess these senses and that we’re capable of registering, on a visceral level, but also intellectually, colour forces, and the relations between colours.

In great painting, these relations accrue.  One colour possessing a certain value makes a certain impression (in your senses and mind) and then, as the eye traverses, it’s joined to the next sensation, and so on, and on.  I think great paintings possess a momentum where the relationships keep on adding up.  The relations build like tall pieces of architecture.  Certain relationships are in harmony, and certain necessarily dissonant, but the whole thing together forms a kind of giant structure.

In my paintings, I’ve found myself drawing more, and things have become more linear.  Lines have the power to make vibrations along their entire length and can join things together.  They move at such great speed.  It’s been really useful to me to include these new types of mark, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in the gallery, to see how they work in this space.  It’s exciting to make new work, and then to know that another shift will happen, when new elements synthesize with stuff one’s being doing in the last few years.

ML I remember the sea was present conceptually in your work in earlier years.

TR There is a line in Hamlet, that arrives like a shock, in which someone describes another as ‘mad as the sea and wind’. I’m not sure why it struck me, but maybe something about the conjunction between a mental state and a simple noun, or the vividness it seems to conjure up of what the sea is capable of, but above all, the sense that real, physical things, the sea in this case, can take on irrational states; and the antithesis of that, its capacity for rationality. And by extension, what order means in painting.  This relates to design in painting, but also how one kind of design can be interrupted by what is happening on the surface and by other, intervening, bits of drawing.

ML Interesting, it reminds me too of your work having a dimensional – we called then a sculptural as sculptural approach.

TR Yes, we’ve spoken about the process of painting: about the genesis of an idea about what mark to make next, and how and the appearance of that idea.  And I’m really interested in how that idea forms, where it comes from.  How the idea appears to emerge from what the painting is calling for.  And then, obviously there is the next step, which is how that idea converts into the act of making a mark. People talk about decision making in painting, and obviously that is understandable, but it somehow elides the dual nature of the process, which is emanation of idea and the conversion of the idea into a physical mark.

ML So less a sequence of events and more a push and pull of currents perhaps?

TR Yes, and I am thinking about the word for the surface of the water – the meniscus – as a crossing point between the air and the volume of water below it.  I love the idea of that boundary, the tension between the two states, that it is not static, but rather quite tough, it distorts, can be distorted, it responds to the movement of wind across its surface, the waves.  It’s capable of breaking up, and down.  It gets thrown around but is also liable to be absolutely flat and smooth.  It seems an interesting image in the context of this crossing point from water to air, invisibility to visibility, blackness and light, in the context of how paintings’ ideas emerge.

 

1) “Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend which is the mightier” Hamlet, Act IV Scene 1.

 

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Biography 

Tom Robinson

[ 1979
- Present ]
Tom Robinson grew up in Dorset then moved from London to Jersey before settling in Norfolk. He studied at the Byam Shaw and The Prince’s Drawing School (now the Royal Drawing School). He was shortlisted for the Gilchrist Fisher award in 2010…

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