Jenny Robinson

Victorian Gasometer, by Jenny Robinson

2010

In October 2019 Robinson received the Mario Avati Gravure Laureate Award from the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris. This award includes a solo Exhibition at the Pavillon Comtesse de Caen, opposite the Louvre in Sept 2021. Brought up in Sarawak, Borneo (now Malaysia), Jenny's earliest impressions of the effects of light and colour were formed there. Since studying for her BA Fine Art Printmaking at WSCAD in Surrey UK, Jenny has traveled extensively throughout the world, always with a sketchbook within easy reach. During these travels she concentrated on refining and developing her love of light and shadow, particularly how these elements combine with buildings and architectural detail to create an atmosphere of time and place. Robinson is a full time painter/printmaker living in Australia. She exhibits regularly in London, Paris and California. "My studio in San Francisco was based in an area of postindustrial decline, populated by architecture that is on the periphery of people’s vision, hidden either by design or by obsolescence, abandoned and forgotten. My work has always been informed by my immediate environment - where I live, work and go has a direct impact on the subject matter I am drawn to. After moving from London to San Francisco in 2001, I became fascinated by structures displaying a sense of strength and energy, but ignored, threatened by the passage of time to ultimate defeat by corrosion and decay. My work is concerned with depicting how these giant structures appear, not through a sense of romantic yearning for the past, but by responding to location and documenting how they appear to me, now, in the moment." - Jenny Robinson As an artist who works primarily on paper, printmaking is the perfect vehicle for Robinson to explore these themes of atmosphere and corrosion. The monoprint process enables her to create images that are drenched and heavy with dark ink. Using deeply saturated colors and textures not only reveal the surfaces of the structures but also permeate the emptiness around them. The physical nature of making large format monoprints helps to create the monumentality of its subject matter. Each step of the process, from drawing the image onto the plate, scouring and gouging, inking, and finally, wiping the surface for printing, suffuses the final print with a textural, tactile, physical quality difficult to achieve in other media, creating the perfect balance of color, texture and line.