Lorna Robertson was born in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland in 1967. She studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and currently lives and works in Glasgow. Her densely coloured paintings, often made with a combination of oil paint and collage, have a distinctly nostalgic tone; shimmering female forms with swinging skirts from the 1950’s or bonneted bathers from the 1920’s jostle with richly described interiors; and crowded table-tops.
"My paintings", she says "sit somewhere between abstraction and figuration, a tangled game of hide- and-seek that plays with the visibility and readability of an image. I often paint to find out what to paint, creating harmonies and tensions through placement of shape, specificity of colour - the process itself becoming an act of revealing."
The characters in her work are at once deeply evocative, and yet strangely anonymous. They conjure an unreliable sense of time and place, flitting between decades and moods from one moment to the next. Hints and glimpses of something tangible - a fashion model, for example, or a vase of flowers, appear and then fragment into painterly patterns and explosions of colour.
Ingleby recently presented Lorna Robertson’s work in New York, and it was described by the New York Times thus:
"Lorna Robertson’s paintings stand out because they are bright, playful, colourful - and often commandingly large. But they are also smart, taking a century and a half of revolutionary art - including Impressionist pastels and expressionist gestures and drips , Symbolist dreaminess and oddball feminist stridency (think Florian Stettheimer or Jutta Koether) - and sticking them into a blender. What comes out is bold but approachable. It draws you in then whips you around a little bit.” (NYT, 7th September, 2023).
In 2026, for the Glasgow International Festival, Glasgow Print Studio presented Painting, our mutual friend, an exhibition of etchings, monoprints, watercolours and oil paintings exploring the dynamic relationship between printmaking and painting through the creative and personal partnership of Lorna Robertson and Andrew Cranston.