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James Robertson |
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The simple quiescence of James Robertson’s images is redolent of the defining works of Mark Rothko; they are ethereal whilst at the same time megalithic. Rothko is quoted as saying: ‘Often, towards nightfall, there’s a feeling in the air of mystery, threat, frustration – all of these at once. I would like my painting to have the quality of such moments.’ James’ painting does have that quality. In the tradition of the Romantic landscape, James transfers pure emotion onto the canvas. The eighteenth-century words of Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful – ‘Of the colours of beautiful objects we note that they must not be dusky or muddy but clean and fair; they must not be of the strongest kind, but mild in tone; or, if vivid, they must be so diversified that each abuts the other, or be mixed with such gradations that it is impossible to fix the bounds of each’ – are applicable to these twenty-first-century canvases. They are lyrical and evocative rather than painstakingly representative; poetry as opposed to prose. It is not merely his use of space which nods back to the likes of Rothko and Diebenkorn but also his attention to surface qualities: brushstrokes and texture, the monumental canvas size, the handling of serendipity. What mattered in Abstract Expressionism were the very qualities of the paint itself and the very act of applying the paint. Like Diebenkorn, who depicted that special Californian light, James conjures up the light of the Clyde coast using a scumbling technique and stunning juxtapositions of colour applied with confident brushwork. It is not so much the skies and horizons that he is bringing to our notice as the actual technique of bringing them to our notice.
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