ROBERT WELCH

Robert Welch is a quiet man, but his air of calm belies a sharp attachment to the details of everyday life, the significant mundanities that catch one’s eye while on the way to somewhere else. And his eye is in the city where the world is continually framed and reframed, clipping its edges, narrowing the focus onto the incidental – incidents which in themselves are less important than the associations they trigger in the mind, for cities are places of many layers.

‘Painting the world around me is, in one sense, merely a vehicle - a way of entering that particular arena of plastic expression where feelings and sensations mingle. Much like my abstractionist friends, my effort is to give the work some kind of autonomy, yet I am interested in how part of oneself may be 'reflected in' or 'echoed back' by the environment.’
RW 2020

There is a flattening and a simplification of the image, few gestures and an economy of means which is not brevity so much as the result of great preparation. The making of the image includes many earlier images, often on paper, fine-tuning balance and colour, drawing the space with minimal means. The image is a process of distillation both in the mind’s eye and on the surface of the canvas.

Chris Horrocks from Critical Faculty

Robert Welch’s painting has shifted its concerns to the structure of landscape as an extension of interior space: often the external world is represented as architecturally framed by, and seen in terms of, a window. Welch sets himself the task of reconciling inside with outside, and his latest work moves away from atmospheric mimesis to confront the linearity of the picture plane. This radical shift subordinates landscape to its representation. Often what gives the pictures their unity is the sense of an architecture that can extend beyond the edge of the paintings, as a supplement and frame.

 From In The Studio: Robert Welch’s paintings by Mali Morris (Turps Banana magazine, Issue #8)

The new works have the distinction of epiphany, delicate, and fleeting, melancholic perhaps, but not sentimental. At the same time they are as much about painting – about abstract painting, figurative painting, any painting – as they can possibly be, and therefore seem robust, time-defying, and convincing, reaching down through mood towards structure.

A man with a white T-shirt of a torso; and here is just a fragment of landscape paired with an electric fire. A block of flats would look grim but for its grid of tiny, glowing pastel-lit windows. A white kettle. A bucket. A drum-kit. But why are the things the way they are? Is it the same question as why are the paintings the way they are? Why does this make me feel and experience something, rather than understand it as description or idea? The paintings are stringent, but have an ease about them. It strikes me as poignant that they turn out to have what I would call beauty, for they do not seem to deliberately seek it.

‘I became more alert to a poetic reading of painting, despite it being fraught with cliché - how the world outside mirrors the psyche, the interior. It took the likes of a so-called naïf (Alfred Wallis) or faux-naïf (in the case of Lowry) to persuade me of the undeniable power of metaphor, haunting and uncomplicated. One such moment was an unexpected encounter with a painting by Lowry, which looked more like the moon than the Lake District. The lake had become an ominous stagnant white pool in the shape of a dead bird. The picture seemed poisoned by emotion.’ RW 2010

LINKS

Robert Welch is a frequent exhibitor at the Linden Hall Studio gallery in Deal, Kent.

lindenhallstudio.co.uk

robertwelch.info

Kapil Jariwala, Catalog introduction and Press Release

Robert Welch makes some of the most sublime paintings, he brings serenity through his subtle understanding of colour and the bold simplification of drawing and shape. There is a sense of anticipation in these paintings, they have been cleared of clutter to herald the viewer to the world of the painting, a pure world of colour.

Welch paints either directly from the subject matter or increasingly goes to the studio with ideas started elsewhere, the distinction between these two activities is important in understanding Robert Welch as a painter. Firstly the speed employed in his outdoor paintings is essential to maintain the rhythmn of his responses, like a jazz improvisor making instant decisions to the shifting structure of music, they are ‘live’ paintings and often have the awkwardness of something seen for the first time.

The studio are much cooler and radiate deliberation borne out of detatchment. In these paintings Welch manipulates the plasticity with the verve and daring of an abstract painter, free from the bond of local colour and descriptive exactitude; the only commitment the painting has is to be true to itself.

Biography

Born Wolverhampton 1956

Education
Stourbridge College of Art 1975
Hull College of Art 1976-79 BA hons
Manchester Polytechnic 1980-81 MA

Employment
Winchester College of Art 1983-2003
Manchester Polytechnic 1983-96
Canterbury College of Art 1989-92
Chelsea School of Art 1996-current
Kingston University 1991-current
Lived and worked in London since 1982

Studios
Victoria Park 1983-93
Carpenters Rd (acme) 1993-96
APT Deptford 1996-current

Workshops
Triangle USA 1989