An appreciation by Peter Rossiter Robin Holtom has found the inspiration for his landscapes at home in S.W. Wales, on visits back to England and abroad, in Italy and the South of France. The paintings also reveal an interior world of the studio (in Llechryd or Tuscany), usually filled with the artist's model, a still-life or just a section of a room seen from an odd angle. Holtom is also an accomplished artist in other fields, the drawing and thinking that lies behind his figures show a sculptor's grasp of their essential forms, while in the fluidity and subtlety of the handling of his colours can be seen the lessons learned from the silk screen works. The territory is familar, Matisse springs readily to mind, Holtom shares the urge to return to "purity of means". The comparison is unavoidable but it is not the slavish similiarity of a weak imitation. Holtom has been drawn by his own inner necessity to take the same direction as Matisse took, or Cezanne indicated, and then he moves on to find his own way forward. Above all Holtom's work is informed by a strong taste for colour. A taste which verges on the edge of hedonism but is held in place by a classical sense of appropriate form and structure. The colours demand our attention on a planimetric, or almost heraldic level, but the drawing holds this tendency in control. A nude form, or the shapes of fields, or foofs, act as the clothing or frame for plays of colour to live and dance and hold their own. The nudes are often accompanied by their own introspective reflections in the studio mirror, their classicized and rather cool poise mitigated by touch of sensuality. In Holtom's work I find pictures that will definately last and promise to respond well to being lived with, like a good book they will to some extent "read us" as we live our lives around them and they are also strong enough to demand that we keep looking at them fresh to find new bits in them, and ourselves. back to top of pageCurriculum Vitae Training etc
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