The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh, 1994
ROBBIE BUSHE'S solo return with 'New Pictures' to Edinburgh's The Scottish Gallery offers critical opportunity to appraise and define aesthetic talents, better endowed and standing above those young contemporaries, most of whose paintings may be faulted as being illustration writ large.
Yet, paradoxically, Bushe's earliest training in graphics persists in the narrative elements omnipresent in his imagery which differs greatly from those of, for example, Steven Campbell, who seems - when iconography and design mismatch - to willfully alter tact.
Such demanding challenges are the intellectual substance of Bushe's art, whose pictorial design proclivities are visible in small watercolours, where influences stretch from Leonard Rosoman to Mary Potter to Dudley D Watkins. Obscurity is therefore replaced by mystery while one's senses are seduced by waves of broken colour.
Though superficially it may suggest a rough pointillism or the domestication of Post-Impressionism via the Euston Road School, in view of his Northerly Expressionist birthright, I find his treatment of colour resonant to that of the subtler, decorative painters of the Vienna Secession. One might view his concern for niceties of media and colour usage as behaviour inherited from studies at Edinburgh, were it not for the powerfully emotive and constructive roles these play in a work like the large wedding breakfast 'On behalf of my wife and I...'
This is the most complex of genre subjects, humorously reflecting life in the rural gossip-ridden villages and small towns of North-East Scotland. Combined, in many their visual poetry equates with Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood and, in one stunning instance, 'little Bo Peep' approaches the making of poetic myth. He can also find poetry in America viewing 'burger King Canyon'. Yet, his abilities to convey that country's low life in prosaic terms is obvious in the gutsy vulgarity of 'Camcorder Couple'
Edward Gage: The Scotsman 18th April 1994
The Scottish Gallery Edinburgh April 1994
TWO KEYS offered in the catalogue for Robbie Bushe's show of almost 60 works at the Scottish Gallery open doors to an understanding of the man and his work. Childhood involvement in the production of subversive playground comics, and college training in Graphics, proceeded the more formal art education which led to prizes and bursaries and a career as a lecturer in drawing and painting.
The fun and mischief of irreverent narrative illustration, which enlivened his school days, invigorates - and perhaps undermines - his serious commitment as a painter. As an observer of the human comedy he has in the past wittily chronicled the aimless drudgery of day-to-day existence and its escapist excesses in pubs and at parties.
His most substantial new work, when it survives jokey titles, has a more serious purpose and at times achieves an almost mystical grandeur. Big canvases of a wedding feast, figures in urban and industrial landscapes, recumbent characters in decorative interiors tease with unspoken sub text; the painter/narrator speaks, and we hear his voice, but he leaves the sense of what he is saying to our imagination. He is a very gentle colourist - the ghost of Gillies haunts a few of his interiors and brings off compositional eccentricities with calculated effect.
Beyond a dozen of these beguiling commentaries ranges another exhibition - of pretty pictures on a smaller scale, accomplished, vivid and many of them funny enough to induce a chortle from all but impossibly po-faced. Too many, however, make no sense without immediate access to their titles - like cartoons which are meaningless without captions. The industrial Mr. Bushe should be encouraged to take himself and his gifts more seriously. I was left with the impression that I had found some poetry between the pages of a tuppence-coloured bumper book of fun.
W Gordon Smith: Scotland on Sunday April 17th 1994
