Suffolk-based fine art oil painter Robert Walker, perhaps better known as theartistrobert, is a Beautiful Bizarre Artist Directory member. Below he provides some fascinating insights into his practice and experience as a ‘geo-figurative’ painter, as he responds to the questions below:
- What are you hoping to communicate to the viewer through your work?
- What’s the most challenging part about creating art for you?
- What role do you feel art and the artist have in today’s society?
- Do you think beauty in art is important?
What are you hoping to communicate to the viewer through your work?
I primarily seek to create a dialogue between the viewer and archetypal human gestures all supported and influenced through geometry and colour. With an interest in – and informed by – classical geometry, my figures inhabit a compositional space that I hope both feels timeless and yet contemporary in is presentation. I aim for the work to awaken something deeply personal for the viewer such that they feel both energised and motivated, yet ultimately satiated from the viewing experience.
What’s the most challenging part about creating art for you?
For a long time, I have been chasing the technical components of presenting a quality finish, but lately, maintaining emotional creative spontaneity within a refined structural framework is my biggest challenge. I rely on an academic approach to the figure as well as compositional and colour harmony principles but then push these into expressive territory to satisfy my own busy internal appetite for a narrative and the need to enjoy a ‘letting go’ within the structure created.
The figure on its own wouldn’t cut if for me. There has to be an initial planned and executed approach based on the semiotics of the figure – which satisfies the engineering part of my brain – but then have it laced with expressive energy through shape and colour to satisfy my own creative aesthetic. The approach is both the challenge and the reward.
What role do you feel art and the artist have in today’s society?
In an era dominated by a daily myriad of fleeting visuals, there are few that truly arrest the eye and resonate new meaning. Without any ‘technical’ distractions – that is, the presentation and technique are considered high quality and competent – some paintings have an innate ability to serve as deeper repositories of attention, memory and emotion for others as do many artistic outputs.
Our role is to re‑enchant everyday spaces with nuance, emotional subtlety, and depth -something Beautiful Bizarre supports very well by spotlighting artists who balance technical virtuosity with narrative and emotional richness.
Do you think beauty in art is important?
I think beauty can exist in many forms and layers – from the obvious beauty of the aesthetic, to the beauty of the idea, the beauty of a pose, the beauty of the emotional impact and so on. As artists we chase that beauty and the communication of it. We are compelled to share our own beauty with others and hope they are too imbued with its power and cohere with it deeply. So, it can’t be any more important. Beautiful Bizarre consistently promotes and elevates art that embodies such layered beauty, whether realist, dreamy, surreal, haunting, or formally rigorous, and thankfully presents a rich breadth of our own important chases for others to enjoy and explore.
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