‘History Revision’ is the name of a new series of portraits by Keith Robinson, featuring the same exquisite colour choices and compassionate treatment that won him second prize in last year’s BP Scottish Portrait Awards. Looking back over his own history in this conversation with Sarah, Keith reflects on the importance of competitions for his unconventional path as an artist. Leaving school early, he travelled around the UK with friends, working various jobs. His intended A-level studies in maths, art, and physics – with an eye to pursuing architecture – would later, like his work in offices, come to bear on the subject that has made his career.
It was, he says, a time of action, not over-thinking; a perseverance paralleled in the search for the perfect artistic subject. This proved to be the paintings of tower and office blocks that Keith has become known for, in addition to his portraiture. Buildings such as the old Birds Eye HQ on the Thames and Hannibal House of Elephant and Castle, those that populate this country – visible from motorways and inner cities alike. It clicked for him that such buildings can “sit like a canvas on the landscape; literally sit on the horizon” and the result is a unique aesthetic, between representation and abstraction. Listen to the podcast to hear more on how the formalism of Keith’s subject offers him liberation as an artist, and how in life, as in art, he has always trusted the process.
