I’m an artist based in London, working principally in coloured pencil and oil paint.
Some recent testimony about my work, from art historian Marco Livingstone:
“Over the past five years, English artist Robert Clear has been breathing new life into the still life tradition using not only oils on canvas but a rather unexpected medium, that of coloured pencils on paper.
Frankly, it shouldn't be possible to create works of such luminosity, subtlety and detailed textures using only layers of marks made with pencils sharpened to their finest points.
Perhaps it helps that he never went to art school, so was never dissuaded from following his instincts or embracing his immense natural ability and technical virtuosity.
Working from his own photographs of museum objects, flowers and insects brought together in ways one would never encounter them in real life - now that those precious objects are mostly housed safely in museum display cases - he presents scenes of poignant beauty as hyper-realistic mirages. Paying little attention to trends in contemporary art, looking instead to art historical precedents and particularly to 17th-century Dutch painting, he succeeds in creating a world that is at once ancien, timeless and strikingly original.
I particularly love the images that set off the fragile objects against the indeterminate space of a velvety black ground, but all the variations so far explored by Clear hold my attention just as powerfully.”