Robbie Bushe
I reimagine places and invent narrative scenarios within a cinematic context, often celebrating the tropes found in science fiction film and TV. I paint from memory, deduction and invention embracing the physical act, helping me recall half-forgotten events and imagery. My early work focused on domesticity and modern family life. I grew up watching epic cinematic films, such as “Ben Hur” and “2001 a Space Odyssey”, informing the epic panoramas I create in my work. I try to recreate known locations from improvised associated memories using pictorial cutaways and dolls house devices allowing multiple events and timelines to co-exist within the same picture.
Robbie Bushe is a narrative painter who creates detailed and suggestive stories in architectonic settings. He has won several national awards, including the W. Gordon Smith Painting Prize and the inaugural Houston Blackadder Mid-Career painting award, which provides £20,000 in funding for eight months of concentrated painting starting in April 2024. Bushe has exhibited his narrative paintings since 1990 and has been a shortlisted prize-winner of John Moores Painting Prize 2020 at the Walker Gallery Liverpool. He also won the Highly Commended prize at the Contemporary British Painting Prize 2023 with exhibitions in Huddersfield and London UK. Bushe was born in Liverpool in 1964 and grew up in Aberdeenshire. He graduated in painting from Edinburgh College of Art in 1990. He has lectured at Aberdeen, Chichester, Kent, and Oxford and is now a lecturer in Arts at the University of Edinburgh. He was elected a member of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art and Architecture in 2017.