Milk Painting

"Robertson creates absorbing and disturbing paintings using cinematic techniques like extreme angles and distortions and often hybrid subjects, which bring to light aspects of ourselves that we would hardly want to know about. Magnifying the darker threads of human life, the mysterious world of desires and defences, these modern takes on a Surrealist heritage, mimic the "˜dreamwork' that Freud described, where desire is veered away from, only to take on the form of strange convergence." Newblood Art "In my work, I search for that uncanny, uneasy thing that pulls you in and freaks you out, believing that within all of us there is something hidden, a dark seedy side, where a mixture of melancholic vision and ecstatic emotion lingers below the surface. Appropriating images directly from photographers, fashion shoots and the wonder that is Google, I collage together a narrative based on the cheap melodrama of tabloid journalism, with an animal cast in domestic environments. Key to my work is confronting our true emotions and desires, especially in relation to coming-of-age defiance, identity, independence and vulnerability. The long and complex relationship between man and beast makes the Horse a perfect vessel through which we can enter and act; the animal pretense generating a safety in which our deepest hopes and fears will not be ridiculed by the skepticism of reality. Pathos encourages us to make emotional ties and bonds with these protagonists and place ourselves in the narrative of the works, to the extent that we come to feel almost a sense of self pity, as we look on at these unknown creatures, in a way a human depiction wouldn't allow."