Robert
Meldrum
West Sussex artist Robert
Meldrum’s current work is based
on the landscapes of Sussex and
Surrey – both rural and suburban
and he draws his inspiration from
the Ashdown Forest, Gatwick
Airport and areas in between. He is
from Forest Row and currently lives
in Horley.
All of his work is derived from detailed
sketches on site, which are then
reworked in his studio, allowing for more
intuitive adjustments which often become
much more internalised and simplified.
Robert says: “You store a lot of visual
data up and shelve it because the
final painting can be very quick, I don’t
actually enjoy the painting process
a lot of the time partly due to the
chemicals in the paints I use, they
make my head spin, and I suppose
partly because I am never sure how
bad they will be initially. But this forces
a more spontaneous approach with
the preparation you have.
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“Once you start painting you want
to bypass a lot of careful thinking, and that
can allow them to surprise me, and you
have to be entertained. Listening to the
radio is no good because you don’t hear
sounds when immersed in a painting.”
Robert says his paintings are his
company for the day. If they go well he
will get up early the next day to see them
finished which, he adds, is a good feeling
to take to the next piece of work.
Robert is like Blake and Shelley deriving
his inspiration from West Sussex – a
muse which is centuries old, yet his
inspirations – painter and graphic artist,
Robert Rauschenberg, painter and
printmaker Jasper Johns, and Phillip
Guston also a painter and printmaker,
show a thoroughly modern sensibility,
and his use of elements of graffiti art to
add effects to his landscapes.
Award-winning art incubators, Debut
Contemporary, said of Robert: “The
rarest of things: a landscape painter
working an easel in the classical tradition,
and yet an unmistakable contemporary
artist, experimenting freely with
abstraction and colour.
He has exhibited internationally and is
already in numerous private collections
in the UK, Europe and Russia. In the
UK he has exhibited at Threadneedle
Street and the Chequer Mead gallery,
and is represented by Theuer and
Scherr in Germany.
“I initially tend to see paintings from their
location literally complete in my mind.
Then it becomes a technical challenge to
render that image” he adds.
A full-time painter, Robert started as a
child, quite taken by the Tate Modern,
and came to see it as a career choice
quite early on.
He said: “I lapped up the modernism, I
would go home and imitate quite a lot
of the styles quite crudely but naturally.
I remember doing cartoony versions