Meet the Artist: E8 Art Trail Newsletter
This month, in our Meet the Artist series, we talk to Rosa Robinson about the life and work of her late husband, Melvyn Robinson.
Rosa leads me up the stairs to her flat, following a garland pegged with prints of her husband's work: “I put them up for the last trail and I've just left them there, I love coming home and seeing his work”. She shows me into her colourful living room, dominated on all sides by large canvases of different styles of paintings. Melvyn started painting in the 50s and he continued right up until 2013, and the family has a huge archive of pieces covering different eras of his artistic life. “My daughter spent such a long time categorising his work and named these categories, she wrote all about it and then my son-in-law turned it into a book. It is so important to me".
Melvyn started by painting the scenes of Barnsley where he grew up, a category his daughter named Representation; works that are rooted in careful observation of the world around him. His paintings feature miners (his father worked down the mines), the old open air market in Barnsley that is no longer there, football crowds and more. “I love this one! (see middle picture below). It is him [Melvyn] as an art student in Barnsley, they used to go to this pub called the Temple of the Muses and that's him with his art school mates, sketchbook under his arm”. She also points him out in a band painting “he played trombone and piano, and taught Music and Art for many years”.
Rosa talks me through the next two eras, Structure and Geometry. “Having these categories is very important, they tell the development of his story… This is all he did in the 1970s, geometry. He had loads of these, 4x4s, all triangles and squares. This is all pre-computer, all done by hand and you can see the little numbers here; he had to measure it all out". She points to the painting above the piano; “that one is called Boogie Woogie and we thought that was quite good over the piano! He used to play it a lot”.
The next two categories “go deeper” says Rosa. In Ambiguities geometric patterns gain a new with subtle hints of three-dimensional perspective, and then “right at the end, it all comes together with Transformations. It comes full circle, with everything in there at the end. That's the masterpiece” she points at Hackney Flats (bottom right photograph). “It just has so much in it, it is like my telly! I look at it and see new things all the time”.
I ask Rosa for her favourite memory of Melvyn, and she beams with joy. “What a lovely question!”. She looks out the window. “You know, he was very funny. He made us all laugh so much”.
