3141: A self-portrait Painting

Robert Pigott was born in the UK in 1948, in Brigg, Lincolnshire and educated at Brigg Grammar. Following the Art Foundation course at Leicester College of Art he moved to Stockport in Greater Manchester to study Art and Design for Advertising. In 1971 he won a scholarship with the advertising agency, J.Walter Thompson in London, and remained there as Art Director for several years. During this time, he studied painting with the artist Rudolf Ray in London and in Mexico. Ray, whose work had been praised by fellow Austrian, Oskar Kokoschka, was an important influence. (Ray had previously worked with Marcel Duchamp in Paris and was to accompany him to New York in 1942, where Duchamp introduced Ray to Peggy Guggenheim). Despite the early encouragement from Ray it was only very much later that the process of art was taken more seriously. He is currently dividing his time between painting and researching and writing a new book entitled, The Nazareth Parallel, a radical work which blurs the boundaries between Science and Religion. Many of his paintings are used in the book to illustrate his unique ideas and concepts. The painting Ananke is used on the cover design. For more information go to the artist's website at About The Art Painting is a search tool, a telescope, a probe, a scientific instrument directed inwards to view the soul of the individual, the soul of Man and the metaphysical world. The canvas, the painting is a direct expression of the probing, the image captured by the telescope's long exposure to the space within and the mystery of existence. My own need for certainty in the world became the catalyst for a new period of creativity. I considered that through the deliberate use of painting as a tool, its probing potential could be directed to answer the more funadamental questions about ourselves and our world, the notion that painting can be included as a way of enquiry about our world just as, in the same way, Science makes sense of the nature of things around us. In the time of the Renaissance Art and Science were not separated as they are today but were considered as one discipline. In 1954 Herbert Read considered the role of the artist was to retire within oneself, to reach down into the well of consciousness, in an attempt to reach sources of inspiration that do not belong to our time and civilisation, but are archetypal and universal.