Robert Cornwall

My early work was in film and performance. I now work mainly as a painter. I am interested in the movements that are made in producing a painting through marks and the work as a record of the process. Like a single frame in a film. Most of my work has focused on the depiction of the observed image and the validity of what is recorded or seen. I use the methods of a painter as they are already formed as ways of depicting a scene or image and both 'understood' and part of the way we all read a painting. I am attempting to use those methods to make visible something or a reality that has not been 'seen' before. I feel objects can have a presence outside ourselves that act as a reverie or pointer to something 'there', which is as real as anything we can recognise 'here'.
Parts of the piece can be read as showing a recognised form and at times an unrecognised form or image. A colour or mark, a line or a shape conjures up a memory of a past image juxtaposed with something not usually found in the same place. The piece is like a frame in a film or a memory a record of an event but lacks some of the information so has to read using the lexicon of previously accepted means or depicting as in an illusion. The process can match how...

I was educated at Middlesex Polytechnic to BA(Hons) Fine Art and then did a postgraduate in Fine Art at the Slade School of Art.

New Contemporaries. ICA London. 1983
Hunting Prize. Royal College of Art. 2000
Work in various Private collections