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Profile; Lifescapes, March 2006 by Simon Herbert 

Painter Robert Kingston is unequivocal when it comes to his inspirations. “The Abstract Expressionism movement of the 40s and 50s was the best thing to come out of American art,” he says. “It was a time when the US came of age, and took the artworld mantle from Paris.”

In an age where minor variations on a theme are the order of the artworld day, it takes a distinctive voice to set such a line in the sand, but Kingston’s muscularity and deftness of painterly application is reflected in his forthright conversational manner.

“There was a time when I was worried about working in a style that others said reflected a 50s sensibility. And then I simply decided... that’s where I come from.”

It’s a rare painter who can shake off the tyranny of style to produce something distinctive, but Kingston’s canvases resonate with a sense of friction: of motifs and doodles fighting in a free-for-all of expression.

No surprise, then, that Kingston also acknowledges a debt to jazz. “I’m a big jazz fan, inspired by music. I play it in the studio constantly while I’m working.”

As a youngster Kingston was inspired by Van Gogh and Gauguin, and has since added Picasso in particular and Cubism in general to an encyclopaedic range of influences. Kingston maintains that, in an era where painters concentrate on the surface - especially on the west coast - the time is ripe for an antidote to clean hyper-colors and the “pop” style engendered by Warhol and his “daddy” Marcel Duchamp.

“I let things get a little painterly. I build layers.” Kingston’s canvases are delineated by freeform emblems and squiggles that float above flatter color fields, themselves constituted from multiple applications. It’s a constant reworking process that eradicates some layers just as others accrue in a quirky aggregate of activity.

“It’s what I call a “search and destroy” process. I paint intuitively, and just keep doing it until it looks like I can stop.”

Kingston observes that, in terms of the cyclical nature of the artworld, its currently a more accepting time for abstract artists. “Maybe ten years ago it was harder. But I think there’s a current interest in painterliness... that the slick stuff and conceptual work is beginning to wear a bit thin...”

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