Carol Robertson’s paintings remain firmly rooted within reductive abstract conventions. Although she doesn't seek to confirm or record the way the world looks, her work is never disconnected from it. She continues to make an informal relationship with landscape, architecture, nature and the environment. Her current work still employs familiar geometric formations, particularly circles, but in recent years she has also deconstructed the circle into arcs, thereby exploring a more disruptive asymmetry.

 

Throughout her career, she has chosen to use the square, rectangle, and circle for their ideal power, for their aesthetic beauty.

 

Carol Roberston states about her work: 

 

“The power and beauty of geometric form and detail provide me with a catalyst for ways to make art. Adopting the formal restraints of a reductive and often repetitive geometric language takes the chaos out of what otherwise would be an impossibly vast set of visual options upon which to pin my existence. Geometry allows me to concentrate on the essential. It allows me the freedom to channel sensory or poetic material through its refined parameters. Over time my work evolves in tandem with whatever is happening in my life, emotionally, spiritually, intellectually and physically. The enduring constant is my commitment to working with the non-hierarchical and pragmatic language of geometric abstraction.”

 

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In recent years Robertson has been responding more directly to a state of flux and impermanence, recording notions of transience and change. Multi-colored circles or arcs began to traverse her canvasses, sometimes with collisions and crossovers registering flashes of chance and coincidence, or summoning reminiscences of small arcane details that fleetingly curve across one’s vision.

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From 2005 onwards all her paintings are prepared with poured and stained grounds, often in many layers. These atmospheric and unstructured colour fields complement the carefully drawn and over-painted geometry. Her colour registrations evolve intuitively and are often associative: they can change frequently during the painting process. She looks very carefully at the effect of each colour against or upon another. Colour is Robertson’s key to unlocking her meditations. Every painting contains a complete history of colour, each a version of memory and sensory experience.

 

 

Carol Robertson lives and works in London and is married to fellow artist Trevor Sutton. She is primarily a painter and printmaker, represented in the UK and USA by Flowers Gallery and by Peter Foolen Editions in the Netherlands.  In the autumn of 2014, she published a fully illustrated 96-page hardback book with her husband. Carol Robertson & Trevor Sutton - French Paintings, published by Peter Foolen Editions in Eindhoven. In 2018 she has completed a large body of silkscreen monoprints, Free Fall to be launched with Flowers Gallery. In the autumn she returns on a month-long residency to Alayrac in the Midi Pyrenees.

 

CV Available Upon Request.