In the past Bob’s style would have been described as impressionist, a style dependent on objective seeing – the everyday accidents of light, colour and form, rendered by accidents of the medium.
Recently however in the last 5 years or so Bob has been working without any seen images at all. He works directly from the canvas, from the paint rather than a previously seen image.
“My first brush-strokes are usually made when I have only a very tentative, vague idea about the form a painting might take. Even then, initial ideas are normally overwhelmed early-on by the unforeseeable developments of the creative process. It is a process full of open-ended narratives, images and ideas that sow seeds, spark fires, and start relationships.”
Bob is an accomplished artist who also has a deep understanding of the christian faith. This combination has produced paintings that speak the faith free of sentimentality and full of theological insight.
Born in England, Bob trained as an art teacher and later as a priest before moving to Australia in 1989. He developed a love of nature and landscape while in England which was further developed while working as a parish priest in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Many of Bob’s landscape paintings have been inspired by the Pilbara, Murchison and the South West of Western Australia. He now lives in Toodyay, Western Australia, where he works in his studio (pictured above). Recently Bob has turned his attention to religious artworks where he continues to explore this new creative process.
