Robert Linsley

           

                  

Can you briefly describe what you do?

In my Island paintings I pour commercial polyurethane enamel paint onto the canvas, then lift and tip it to make the paint flow into a shape. The canvas lies flat on the floor while the shape dries, then I pour another one. Most of the work goes on between pours. Lately been making watercolours, which means back to brushes, but try to apply what I've learned from the pours about letting the image produce itself.

What drives you to make work?

As it happens, I could never have answered this question until very recently. Because the work is ongoing, flowing and momentary, I think I'm really trying to unify my life and my art. Strange that I never had such an intention and normally would never think in those terms, but the evidence seems to be there. I don't want time to pass, but to be lived through, if that makes sense.

Can you tell me something of your day-to-day working practices?

As above. Since each pour is unrepeatable, a day without painting is a painting that will never be.

How long have you been working in that way?

Since 1998

Which artists have had the greatest affect on your work?

On a deep level my work is possessed by Jackson Pollock, but Picasso might be below that, and what I see as the Poussin-Cézanne axis is perhaps even more fundamental still. I look at Tiepolo a lot. Over the last few years been looking at many great and insufficiently acknowledged abstractionists - as it happens mostly women - Gego, Joan Mitchell, Marisa Merz, Carla Accardi, Helen Frankenthaler, Mary Heilman, Mira Schendel, Lygia Pape, Bridget Riley, R.H.Quaytman. None of these people are unknown, but their importance is yet unmeasured.

What, outside visual art, informs your practice?

A few years ago theoretical physics had a big impact on me. There is an important research institute in my town, and I've spent a lot of time there and met many very interesting scientists. P.G.Wodehouse

How would you like people to engage with your work?

However they feel, but not through concepts.

Have you seen anything recently that has made an impression?

Nowadays I am really in love with Frank Stella's Moby Dick series. Can't get enough of it.

Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

Planning a print edition.