Take 1 wielder of paint, 1 hot bath, lashings of canvas, 8 sheets of notepaper, mix, shake, break, oscillate wildly and you get...
James Robinson
Left Bank Art Gallery - cnr Mawhera Quay & Tainui Street, Greymouth
Wednesday, 2nd April 2003
Rating: 
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| Life's a drive through a dust bowl | What's it do, do to a young soul? | We are deeply concerned | and deeply concerned we should be. After all, 'tis better than being deeply disturbed. And you could be forgiven for feeling deeply disturbed after viewing works by Dunedin based artist and performance poet James Robinson who's still driving through his personal dust bowl. James' works personify the tortured artist suffering on the fringes of society, and he could very well resent that statement. But hey, the wine was good, the cheese 'n' dip was good, the art was... simply defiant of a descriptive narrative - intensive, bordering on macabre, a strong presence of the 'others' and very much as large as but certainly not darker than real life. Socially conditioned and/or culturally indoctrinated James is not, or at the very least that is what he could be fighting against - constantly. So if you want a genre for the sake of feeling more comfortable, 'Art Brut' is as close as you could get. This is not for the feint of heart.
James has an energy that snaps, crackles and electrocutes and could be unnerving for the unsuspecting innocent bystander but he still exudes a deep warmth and a passionate serious intensity that few have managed to muster up along this trek through life. On talking about his website he says its a place where he counsels himself because, does anyone really listen?. There are a few fellow creatures with ears that still hear and the arty farty world is certainly listening up and taking notice of this raw skinned young man digging into his deeply tortured emotions and pulling them up as painted and clawed marks on canvas - marks that hold within them the shape and inflection of his wounds. These are not distorted playful brushstrokes. They are a soul blatantly displayed and screaming "IN YA FACE!".
His own deep and to the bone honesty gives permission for everyone to be who they are, to stand in the middle of a room and spew out the words that lament a life worth living. As a performance poet the words are far more than musings on life and family. This is cathartic stuff delivered soft, hard, furious and fast with impeccably timed edgy humour to take the force of the blow off the somewhat expectantly nervous audience.
| Someone stops for directions | Something responds deep in our engines | We have all been burned | Will heaven wait all heavenly over the next horizon? | Heaven does wait all heavenly over the next horizon for some while others have already found it and I think there is still many a canvas to be attacked and expressed upon, more broken furniture to be deconstructed further before James' personal heavenly heaven is discovered.
(Lyrics acknowledgement : Paddy MacAloon)