Robert Brumby: Revealed, New School House Gallery, Peasholme Green, York, until Christmas Eve (From York Press)

Robert Brumby: Revealed, New School House Gallery, Peasholme Green, York, until Christmas Eve

10:00am Friday 18th November 2011 in Exhibitions By Charles Hutchinson

THE New School House Gallery, in York, is exhibiting paintings and prints by Yorkshire-born artist Robert Brumby. His formal art training began in Hull at the age of 13, culminating in his graduation from the Royal College of Art.

Following a number of years as a designer in the ceramics industry, he set up his own studio/gallery in Shambles in York where he designed and produced murals, architectural sculpture, paintings, ceramic sculpture and functional stoneware for domestic use. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and, after many years of art education and lecturing, he became head of the York School of Art and Design in 1990.

Robert has exhibited widely in commercial and public galleries, including the Royal Academy, and has carried out commissions for schools, universities, hospitals and churches, notably the ceramic reredos (altar screen) for the Church of St Augustine’s, Manchester, the three-metre ceramic Madonna and Child statue for the Cathedral of Christ the King, Liverpool, and the painted reredos for the Cathedral of St Mary’s, Middlesbrough. Born on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds, he has been inspired since childhood by this spacious landscape, where you can see for miles across a vast foreground.

The pattern and texture of the landscape, the marks of ploughing and planting, the man-made tracks and barns, are features he has explored extensively, along with seasonal changes, from poppies threaded through cornfields to the colours of autumn.

For a number of years, Robert divided his time between painting in Yorkshire and the Languedoc in the south of France, while recent work has included seascapes inspired by the Northumbrian coast. One constant fascination has been trees and the ways in which light is filtered through tangled, overlapping branches.

Some of his paintings are drawn from such details, which are enlarged as if through a zoom lens, focusing on the sun or moon permeating through.

Robert has worked across a range of media, both two-dimensionally and three-dimensionally. Many of his three-dimensional pieces have celebrated the human form, while others suggest pollarded trees, shells, crabs, birds and other organic forms.

Over the past ten years his paintings have included a significant proportion of portrait commissions in the medium of tempera. Drawing has always been an important element in Robert’s work, as is the craftsmanship of the final piece. He continues to find that experimenting with different materials and processes gives rise to new ideas. “The advent of the digital pen has provided an opportunity to draw through a digital medium, requiring the same drawing precision and eye to hand co-ordination, but allowing the production of limited-edition prints that can reach broader audiences than other art form,” he says.

• Robert Brumby: Revealed runs at the New School House Gallery, Peasholme Green, York, until Christmas Eve. Opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm; admission is free.