Ian Robinson

I represented Ian Robinson for a few years after he graduated from Wimbledon Art College.  His work is concerned with obsessions and the back-stories of collections, and I particularly enjoy his meticulous oil paintings of old books and the stories behind them.

Excerpt from A-N Review

For artist Ian Robinson, his photorealistic “portraits” of the objects of collections began when he was still at college, and he started to paint pictures of his own record collection. Upon moving to London, he suddenly found he had access to numerous other collections, including those of Sir John Soane, Cassiano Dal Pozzo, and Aby Warburg, and his focus switched from music to literature. He would visit the collections, make drawings and take photos, and then scale these up, sometimes by hand, sometimes by projecting the photograph on to the canvas, and paint them in minute detail over a period of months. The results are documents of documents, catalogues of catalogues, copies and replicas […]  Robinson is a young man, with talent and a passion for his work, and so I can only surmise that his series will continue to grow.

Here are a few paintings that I have had the opportunity to admire in person over the years, and some of the background stories about them.