Clifford Foard Robinson
to
The Collectors' Gallery of Art 1332 9 Ave SE, Calgary, Alberta T2G 0T3
Clifford Foard Robinson, "Untitled - Figures," circa 1952
encaustic on canvasboard, 24" x 18"
Clifford Robinson was both an insider and outsider artist. As the former, he studied at the Provincial Institute of Art and Technology (Alberta University of the Arts) with H.G. Glyde, A.C. Leighton, and Walter Phillips. He learned batik techniques from Marion Nicoll and was a close friend and painting companion of Margaret Shelton. His memberships and affiliations indicate an artist esteemed by his peers and recognized by important art associations: The Society of Canadian Painters and Etchers, The Canadian Society of Graphic artists, The Alberta Society of Artists and the Calgary Group. During a time in Alberta when landscape painting was preeminent, Robinson, like Glyde and Shelton, was capable of transforming ordinary things like prairie trees into something rich and strange. His 1937 painting and 1947 drawing of a knarled tree at Police Point, Medicine Hat are alive with something more than arboreal energy – their long, bony-fingered branches skitter across the canvas like entities from a dark fairy tale. Abstracted figures, and biomorphic forms built of solids and voids recall Henry Moore’s surrealist fantasies, and Robinson corrals them into an assemblage of interior spaces, or situates them within tilted landscapes with endless horizons.
The nude figure appears frequently throughout his work; in attenuated forms and decorative colors like those of Art Deco murals, or as dark, jagged outlines that reveal his familiarity with German Expressionist woodcuts. Robinson was an educated, sophisticated and intellectually curious artist, who often sought to reconcile the nature of his own identity with the motifs and symbols of Christian iconography. There are crucifixions, visions of the garden of Eden, and frequent depictions of the ichthys, or fish. As a gay man, Clifford Robinson remained an outsider, with an outsider’s compassion for the outcast. His sympathetic interest in the nude protests of the Dukhobors is notable, as is the recollection of his nephew Ron Robinson, who said that when he was a young teenager at large family gatherings, Clifford was the only adult that genuinely wanted to talk to him.
There are some ribald and scatological works in the exhibition. They belong to that venerable tradition of northern European art that produced Hieronymous Bosch and James Ensor. They are images of the carnival, where for a few precious hours the iron clad parameters of tradition, hierarchy, and institutional values could safely be mocked, transgressed, and laughed at.
-- Elizabeth Herbert