Robbie Bushe RSA: Ghosts in the Garden
Born in Liverpool in 1964, Robbie Bushe grew up in Aberdeenshire UK before graduating in painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1990, and has since undertaken a career as an artist and art lecturer. He taught painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, was Head of Fine Art at the University of Chichester and has lectured at Kent Institute of Art and Design and Oxford Brookes University. Bushe returned to Scotland in 2007 to run short courses at Edinburgh College of Art. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and was elected as a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in 2017.
Robbie has exhibited his narrative paintings since 1990. Inspired by the characters and the places where he has lived and worked, his work has won many national awards, including the inaugural W. Gordon Smith Painting Prize, and as a shortlisted prize-winner of the 2021 John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Gallery Liverpool.
In 2023, he was a prize-winner at the Jackson Painting Prize, won the Highly Commended at the Contemporary British Painting Prize in Huddersfield as well as The City of Edinburgh Prize at the Scottish Landscape Award. In November 2023, Robbie was the inaugural winner of the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award, a £20,000 prize to enable a six-month sabbatical dedicated to making a new body of paintings in 2024.
‘Ghosts in the Garden’
"I have always been a reluctant gardener. Though, as a child I would get lost in building and rebuilding road networks amongst the dug-up potato beds, and improvising stories, characters and other worlds, against the backdrop our one-acre plot in rural Aberdeenshire.
Half a century later, my partner Catharine and I have our very own grown-up garden with mature trees, shrubs and everything. This one calls out. It says ‘tend me, fix me, weed me, nourish me and landscape me!'. My 10-year-old self-re-emerged; I’ve been landscaping, building paths, sheds, and raised beds while Catharine worked magic planning and planting.
Covid had already made our world smaller, and in a year when it looked like things were opening up, the energy crisis, Ukraine, Brexit and populism, all seemed to make my garden world all the more a sanctuary.
Through 2021, with working from home the new normal, I made a daily drawing for 100 days in our garden, searching for stories, characters, contexts, and histories. Each directly observed from life and taking around half an hour in fibre pens on brown paper. I next developed these drawings into backdrops for an improvised and deliberately clunky narrative animation about the trials of a family of gardeners pitted against a ‘Garden Inspectorate’ hellbent on closing their garden down, reflecting our present world as it leaps from one existential crisis to another.
It took a little longer to figure out how the garden drawings might be developed into paintings. ‘The Road Builder’, a work from my 2021 Open Eye Gallery show, depicted my childhood-self getting lost in modelling roads amongst our raised bed, giving me clues to stage and re-enact memories and ghosts from the past. These stories are mainly improvised as I work, from fleeting memories, cultural tropes and my working life. I like to play with the sometimes ludicrous bureaucracy we all experience through audits, health and safety, online feedback and sharing good practice. Most of the works are based around my current home in suburban south Edinburgh, several about a friend's Victorian house in Finsbury Park, and one using the funicular railway on Hastings East Hill in East Sussex, as its starting point. I make mood boards as a guide for colour, tone and light placement, applying richly mixed and saturated oil colour applied over pencil drawings, often using the smallest of brushes."