Belle Robinson

Over the yearsI have moved from highly representational watercolour still life to abstract expressionism in oils, as I continuously try to evolve and refine my work, and to find my place as a contemporary artist.

Painting poetry

The translation of the written word into image. The fusion of painting and poetry is not illusory; many words describe either, or both - illumination, shape, mood, imagery, form, reflection, harmony, contrast, instinct, passion, challenge.My advancing project salutes the works of WH Auden, WB Yeats, Louis MacNeice and Dorothy Parker.I have been thinking about this undertaking for years. Some poems I first read decades ago have so fired and sustained me in sad and in happy times that I cannot imagine I would be the same person without knowledge of them. I am motivated by gratitude to those poets and this is tribute to them.

Impressions of urban flora

I journey through surface upon surface. By using oil paint highly diluted with turpentine, I flick, scatter and drop each layer, ’growing’ in my paintings a celebration of the surprising intensity of colour to be found in inner city planting, parks and gardens – as a commentary on the narrative of textures, contrasts and colours which shape our lives – and in the inherent drama there.Through this development of the themes of reflection, transience and fluidity in nature, and in the human influence on it, my goal is to marry representation, decoration and abstraction.

Cityscapes and landscapes

I look down into and across the city from fifteen floors above. In some paintings of the panorama before me, I employ the same method as in my paintings of flora, particularly to portray the ever changing skies over London – other works are entirely palette knife-laid - a technique which lends itself to conveying the angles and bones, bulk and bluster of modern city buildings. Although my artistic relationship with London has been central to my work, I have painted many landscapes: the Atlas Mountains, French vineyards, Turkey, Italian islands and the English countryside; sometimes it’s a worm’s viewpoint, sometimes a pilot’s. The image I create is as informed by the intensity and temperature of the light as it is by geology or geography.