Scott Robson

Much of what informs Robson’s practice is a result of his early life experience of religion, myth and fantasy being supplanted by secular logic and rationale. A loss of faith which leaves a longing for magic and melodrama in its wake. His methods of composition are tempered by constant consideration of formal visual elements such as balance, rhythm, direction, while the content and subject matter draws from his memories of art in popular culture, graphic novels, fantasy and science fiction literature and a romantic interpretation of the Western Canon of fine art.

His work is often an attempt to illustrate the absurd nature of experience and the strange mechanics of recall and imagination. Robson has long been fascinated with the Surrealist methods of image conception and the possibilities to disrupt the linear rationality of interpretation and uses various bastardised practices of the Surrealist movement to generate his drawings and paintings. Dredging his subconscious for visual elements that might conspire to imply a narrative, to suggest rather than dictate, pages of an unfinished story to be completed by the viewer.

Robson is primarily a figurative painter and draftsperson but with an abiding love for all art forms he also experiments with a variety of other media and methods including sculpture, textiles, video, printmaking and collage. When he isn’t painting melodramatic archetypes and esoteric symbolism he may be found painting traditional and contemporary landscapes and portraiture like a respectable grownup, or even dabbling in pure abstraction.

Born in 1974 in QLD Australia, he has lived most of his life in Perth WA.

Robson has been a member of WA-based artist collective Studio Payoka since 2020, together with William Leggett, Adam Hisham Ismail and Michele Ulrich.