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Event Series Event Series: Rob Collins Artist

Many of us lucky enough to live in Gloucestershire love its beautiful landscape, magical woodlands and its historic traditions and customs. Rob has made large scale paintings of Gloucestershire woodland, stately trees and delicate woodland flora. There are also large paintings of some of the rites and customs that exist here, cheese rolling, the traditional mummers play, morris dancing on May Hill at dawn on midsummer morning. There are several series of smaller paintings recording the same views at different times of the year capturing the changing seasons.

This exhibition celebrates some of those things that make Gloucestershire such a great place to live.

Rob is captivated by the beauty of the world around us and his paintings relish and record that beauty. He has traditional painting skills built up over a lifetime, his work is a celebration of the process of seeing and the craft of painting. At best he creates pictures with a freshness and lightness of technique that draw you in with their realism and when you get up close and see the marks that make up the surface you think, how on earth did he do that?

Rob Collins has lived most of his life in Gloucestershire but painting has taken him round the world.  After studying Fine Art in Cheltenham and then at the Royal college of Art, for 34 years he showed his work almost exclusively at the Francis Kyle Gallery in London where he had five one person shows and contributed to over 20 group exhibitions.

Oak treeRob’s subjects range from still life to landscape and portraiture but it his evocation of light and his ability to create illusions of space and atmosphere that bring his subjects to life. He recently gave to the Met Office 52 paintings of the same Gloucestershire view painted at weekly intervals throughout a year, recording the changing seasons, they are now part of their archive of weather related artefacts and documents. In 2009 he stood on top of the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour as part of Antony Gormley’s installation ‘One And Other’ using his hour to paint the view across the square whilst being filmed and broadcast live.

In 2001 he travelled to St Lucia in the Caribbean with Mark Horton of television’s ‘Coast’ programme as artist with an archaeological dig investigating an old sugar plantation looking for the remains of the sugar works and evidence of the slaves who had worked there. He was invited by the National trust to make a series of paintings recording the possible effects of climate change on one their properties for an exhibition that travelled to selected properties around the country. In 1993 he was one of the first European artists to show paintings at the first gallery in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. He was commissioned to paint a double portrait of Ralph Lord Montagu and his wife Ailsa that now hangs alongside the historic family portraits at Palace House at Beaulieu in Hampshire.

Rob Collins exhibition runs from Wednesday  February 26th to Sunday March 29th 2020 at the Tetbury Goods Shed Arts Centre, The Old Station Yard, Cirencester Road, Tetbury, Gloucestershire GL8 8EY. Open to visitors five days a week from Wednesday through to Sunday between the hours of 11am – 3pm.

Occasionally the Hall is closed for a private event so we do recommend calling ahead if travelling a distance

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