Interview: Bob Robinson

From his bedroom window, Bob Robinson has a clear view over the General Cemetery which runs down from Canning Circus to Nottingham Arboretum. This corner of central Nottingham has been his home for forty years and it’s in this small, tightly defined area, which includes his studio, that he has produced all of his grotesque, satirical, darkly funny and enormously entertaining paintings. While it’s tempting to think that Bob has been working in obscurity, it isn’t really true: he has shown individual paintings in exhibitions, won prizes and even had a couple of small solo shows. Yet he’s not gained the recognition in his hometown that it’s fair to say he deserves. This, he admits, is partly to do with his relaxed attitude towards self-promotion, and partly to do with the fact that he finds it hard to sell his paintings.

His relatively low profile also comes back to his exaggerated, hallucinatory style and dark subject matter which draws directly on his Protestant upbringing in Northern Ireland and the cast of characters he’s encountered in Nottingham since he came to study art here in the early seventies. The people and places of Nottingham are all over his work. His personal locale can be seen in his early paintings of Canning Circus, from a time when the streets were graffiti’d repeatedly with the words ‘April is a whore’, and of Cromwell Street, where he lives in a tall, narrow house full of his paintings.

His less-than-loving tribute to married life, The Bed of Roses, began with him seeing a man in knee-high Adidas socks photographing ducks in Nottingham Arboretum. The socks are in the painting, as is a couple armed with sharp kitchen knives. The savage A Time of the Month started life after having breakfast in a cafe near Meadow Lane when a woman in furry slippers holding a loaf of bread and a serrated blade appeared and asked, “Who wants toast?”

But Bob is also a fine portrait painter, as can be seen in a profile of his mother-in-law, portrayed in her curlers while she holds a Notts County scratchcard, and in his face-front painting of his former babysitter. “He was in Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous and wanted to keep out of the way on Saturday nights so would babysit for us,” says Bob, his Ulster brogue perhaps a little softened by his years in Nottingham. “He used to bring half of Narcotics Anonymous back with him and they would all sit here playing Scrabble together. I did a portrait of him which was accepted by the National Portrait Gallery for what was then the John Player award.”

Trouble is, Bob’s style of fantastical figurative art, often imbued with social commentary, hasn’t been fashionable with galleries of late. Back in the eighties and early nineties, when work by figurative painters like Peter Howson were snapped up by the rich and famous, Bob’s art was in vogue. Since then, he’s had trouble persuading galleries, including those in Nottingham, to show his work on any scale. Ironically, Bob’s sometimes surreal, sometimes cartoonish style isn’t too different from the kind of paintings you see in the windows of glossy commercial art shops. But such premises aren’t usually in the business of displaying paintings of naked women holding electric knives in one hand and the severed heads of their husbands in the other.    

“People have always said, ‘I love the work but I couldn’t have it in my house,’” says Bob. “A curator at a Sheffield museum who liked my work sent some down to a gallery in London who said, ‘We really love it but we like our reality a bit more veiled.’ So that was that. And people who ran the naif galleries liked the way they were painted but found they were too harsh.” It’s been the same story in Nottingham. “I’ve presented my work here but galleries such as the Castle and Angel Row weren’t interested. At Angel Row Gallery in the nineties they just said it was too obvious. The gallery was in a minimalist phase and storytelling wasn’t very fashionable.”

The two retrospectives of Bob’s work held at Surface Gallery recently have helped to balance the scales. Organised by curator Rob van Beek and funded by money left in the will of a local well-wisher, the pair of exhibitions are the biggest ever public airing of Bob’s paintings and sculptures in Nottingham. Even he hasn’t seen so many of his own artworks together in public. He’s enjoyed the experience, and the many positive comments from visitors, but does he think that such attention, at the age of 63, has come a bit late? “It is a bit odd because I’m terminally ill at the same time. But it’s very nice that everyone has done it and this doesn’t take anything from it.”

Bob was diagnosed with cancer in June 2013. After courses of radiotherapy and chemotherapy he believed the disease had been contained, but was later told that it had spread. In June this year he was told his illness was terminal. However, he has resumed treatment and was due to undergo chemotherapy the day after the opening of his second show at Surface Gallery. As an artist, this period of his life has been frustrating as the treatment and the attention to his diet to maintain his weight has consumed the time he would usually spend in the studio. He has produced little since diagnosis: a handful of little gouaches and four wooden sculptures which reflect the progress of his health. They are called Diagnosis, Treatment, Under Control and Out of Control. Yet, to his credit, he doesn’t sound like a sick man; more like a man who desperately wants to get back to work because he has so much more to say to the world.

Bob was born in Newtownstewart in County Tyrone, close to the border with the Republic. His father Robert was a staunch Ulster loyalist and a member of the B Specials - the uniformed part-time police auxiliary force which was disbanded in the early seventies. Memories of his father inspired his painting B Special in which a big blue uniformed man, a rifle strapped to his back, wraps a protective arm around a little boy who’s waving a Union Jack. Around the periphery are the icons of loyalism: an orange sash and a painting of the Battle of the Boyne. B Special is arguably Bob’s greatest painting and its greatness lies in its moral complexity: while the B Specials saw themselves as protectors of Ulster Protestantism they were considered to be a terror force by Catholics.

At the same time, nobody of any political or religious persuasion can deny the poignant right of a child to feel secure within the arms of their father. “I always remember my father coming back home and he would take his greatcoat off and put it over me to keep me warm,” says Bob. “For me, that whole uniform meant something positive but for a lot of people in Northern Ireland, in the Catholic areas, it wasn’t. And I suppose the little kid with the flag; well, where you’re born into is what is put into you. Yet as a kid I used to stand there with my cousin shouting ‘the red white and blue should be torn up in two’ at Catholic kids until my cousin said ‘that’s the wrong flag you’re shouting about. It should be the ‘green white and yellow’.”

Bob’s move to the East Midlands came in the late sixties when he became an apprentice at Rolls Royce in Derby. He lost heart in the job, was sacked, drifted to London and got stoned a lot before being accepted for a fine art course at the old Trent Poly. At the end of the course, Bob came back to his dilapidated digs in Cromwell Street and ended up buying the place with another former student for £1,500 each. Although this part of town has changed since then, Bob has never had a good reason to move. So, here he is still, in a house full of paintings he can’t bear to sell, waiting for news from the oncologists. “The frustrating thing,” says Bob, “is that I feel I’m just getting going.”

Bob Robinson Part II runs until Saturday 20 December at Surface Gallery.

Bob Robinson website