Crack

Robyn Spear-Bulmer is a Cornish native, who has found her home in the artistic vibrancy of Bristol. Her work is visually grabbing, alive with colour and intricate in directing the eye to detail.

Although Robyn rarely initiates a drawing purely from imagination, her observational studies re-imagine the atmosphere in order to reference material subtly, or entirety, through emphatic line-work and heightened colours, often to hallucinatory effect. For example her studies of Mexican carved and painted wooden toy animals have been imbued with a life-like quality and a sense of greater scale than in actuality.

Although knowing the significance of maintaining awareness of contemporary visual material, Robyn feels it is often more useful to immerse herself in the dialogue simply between hand, eye, pencil and paper. She takes a blinkered approach to making work, based on her experience in finding design journals more of a distraction than a source of inspiration to be tapped. She rather prefers to mine fragments of colour, type, letterforms and motifs from her hoard of record sleeves dating from the 50s to 80s. She enjoys selecting past images from science periodicals, natural history books and records of other cultures. Her intention is to afford these images, perhaps forgotten or unknown to most, with renewed value by making them the subject of her drawings, in a bid to salvage and 'illuminate' them.

Photos from museum visits and travel provide additional subject matter. The prevailing theme of celebratory scenes and objects from other cultures is borne out of Robyn's infatuation with 'otherness'. Mexican and South American subjects feature heavily in her work. Men involved in rituals and festivities are often adorned with silk scarves, ribbons and corsages, and yet manage to maintain their masculinity. In the West this would be far more unusual. The portrait entitled 'Pharisee' depicts the intriguing and unsettling alliance of a head with its features fully obscured in an archaic fur mask, with both rich and delicately colourful 'feminine' embellishments.

Since graduating from U.W.E Bristol with a BA (Hons) in Illustration in 2008, Robyn has developed a sort of personal drawing approach, by densely layering coloured pencil crayon on mid-tone paper to painterly effect. Robyn's use of sensitive, graphic line is influenced by her admiration for the work of Czech artist Alphonse Mucha.

She also applies her drawings to print on both paper and textiles. The designs sometimes digitally incorporate found textures or motifs.


Robyn welcomes enquiries and commissions at the following email address:


robyn.spearbulmer@gmail.com


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