This technically astounding, photorealistic oil painting is a study of some paper folios from the collection of Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), now housed at The British Library in London. Cassiano was one of the most important patrons of artists in Rome during the first half of the 17th century and he was dedicated to forming what he described as his ‘Paper Museum’. The ‘Museum’ that was housed in his library in the small palazzo in Rome comprised a vast collection of drawings and prints bound in folios, that recorded the natural world, antiquity, the built environment, human appearance and behaviour. The painting is in oil on a polished wooden panel and set in a white-washed wooden tray frame.
Paper Museum Folios
Additional information
| Medium | Oil on wood panel |
|---|---|
| Year | 2014 |
| Original / Edition | Original work of art |
| Size | 74 x 56 cm |
Description
Ian Robinson’s work is concerned with obsessions and the back-stories of collections. Working mainly in still life he portrays his personal associations with these items in an attempt to capture the spirit, the soul, and the physiognomy of objects and our-selves as it is revealed through our passions.
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.
Ian has a First Class Ba (hons) Fine Art : Painting from University of the Arts London – Wimbledon College of Art – 2011. He is currently employed as an Artist in the studios of Patrick Hughes.
