Step by Step Guide to Midsummer
A difficult artist to grasp, it’s not my intention to elucidate the full range of Robertson’s misdemeanours and accomplishments. Others have done that both with dull employment and mischievous intensity; send them out as ambassadors! No. Where it seems appropriate, reach out to the creators, their appetites precede them. The search for a new kind of painting begins on a beach in the south of France, imagining seared peinture-mots produced by an artisan skilled in indulging barrenness.
Dabbed and squirted, a small proxy, about twice as good as it needs to be. Only a smaller piece of extra texture is displayed, and it doesn’t matter. No jaded and anonymous shills and pilferers for that mass of matter. One image on stretched canvas. The bonds rupture and the particles move on the surface of the image of an otherwise clothed body, the murmurings of the facture more delicate, magnificent, and tender than any minor historical masterstroke from the 1950s. Drawing strewn here and there. A pellucid bottle green echoes my erstwhile experience as a professional eater, one of pleasure, luxury, and abundance. A puce sluice drips and blobs sans cérémonie, producing a thrill-packed finish as it slowly congeals.
Larger pieces are fully on vapours. A thrilling picture! A dazzling series in abandoned jade and tachisme purée. A luminous emerald slathered before an indifferent public. Dilute browns (known as ‘cinnamons’ in England at the time this goes to press) are a magnificent metaphor for the poète maudit. The striations of the black surfaces, portals into an imaginary 19th-century city, recall the beautiful megalomania of one who frequently wrote to newspapers in support of her besieged friend. Technique mixte. A pillow in relief, painted in the Aquitaine region. All the curves of the model’s body whipped smooth until they turn to garlands.
Merely for diversion, Robertson goes about in odd shapes; in which she acts her part so naturally, that even those who are in on the secret can perceive nothing by which she might be discovered. For that, I’m grateful.
——–
Dr. Mulholland reviewed for Puce Timesfor three years from 1996, during which period he exclusively covered painting in the Zlín Region of Moravia. Although his website www.neilmulholland.co.uk still includes his biography, which can be found through a search engine, it no longer prominently features him.
