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Robin Mason

@robinmasonrobin

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Out of the Archive (study 1), 2026, oil & acrylic on board, 40 x 30 cm.
#contemporarypainting #künstler #celf #stilllife #archive by @robinmasonrobin

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a month ago

…thinking of losing the yellow walls either side of this area,as in yesterday’s post. There ‘s something immediate but unfolding about these images that manage to hold attention and cause confusion at the same time…starting to find what I’ve been searching for (for many many many years🙃🫪😮🙂)…the challenge continues…🪾 🎨… #contemporaryart #contemporarypainting #kunst #celf #künstler by @robinmasonrobin

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2 months ago

Fall (study 1), 2026, oil & acrylic on board, 30 x 25 cm.
#celfcymru #contemporarypainting #kunst #smallpainting #absentpresence by @robinmasonrobin

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3 months ago

In the Presence of Absence (study 1), 2026, oil & acrylic on board, 30 x 25 cm.
#celfcymru #contemporarypainting #kunst #smallpainting #absentpresence by @robinmasonrobin

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3 months ago

Singe d’Or (study 1), 2026, oil & acrylic on board, 30 x 25 cm.
#celfcymru #contemporarypainting #kunst #smallpainting #absentpresence by @robinmasonrobin

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3 months ago

Sit Back and Remember, 2026, oil & acrylic on board, 30 x 25 cm.
#celfcymru #contemporarypainting #kunst #threshhold #smallpainting by @robinmasonrobin

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4 months ago

Reliquary, 2026, oil & acrylic on board, 30 x 25 cm.
#celfcymru #contemporarypainting #kunst #threshhold #smallpainting by @robinmasonrobin

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4 months ago

Whisper from the Archive, 2026 Oil & acrylic on board, 30 x 25 cm
I am now in the seventh month of a self-imposed residency, an ongoing exploration of an archive inherited from my father: photographs, letters, paintings, documents, stories and a handful of objects that have survived the passage of generations.

What began as a search through boxes and folders has gradually become something more complex. The archive has led me backwards along what I have come to think of as a Pink Path, tracing journeys from the industrial landscapes of the Swansea Valley back towards the rural origins of the Lewis and Davies families in Carmarthenshire. Again and again the research returns me to Bryn Myrddin, the house in Alltwen where my father was born and where so many family stories gathered before dispersing into the wider world.

In this painting, an open book rests on a field of pink. Beyond it rises a forest of trees. The image emerged while writing the opening pages of The Pink Path, where I imagined opening a book and finding a tree falling from its pages. The tree became a way of thinking about inheritance: roots spreading through time, branches dividing into lives, journeys and possibilities.

The forest is both landscape and archive. The trunks stand like pages. The spaces between them resemble the gaps, silences and uncertainties that accompany any attempt to reconstruct the past. The book remains open, waiting. Beside it sits a stone, a remnant of something once whole.

As the months pass, I find myself less interested in recovering definitive histories than in listening for whispers: small traces of lives carried forward through photographs, letters, memories and places. The archive does not simply preserve the past. It continues to generate new paths through it.
#contemporarypainting #kunst #celfcymru #artistresidency #writing by @robinmasonrobin

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4 months ago

…the story so far…now it’s a waiting game… @royalacademyarts by @robinmasonrobin

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7 months ago

Whispers from Bryn Myrddin: The Forest and the Photographs

The path to Bryn Myrddin does not move in a straight line. It bends through the forest, through memory, through the layered remains of lives that once moved beneath these branches.

In this painting, the forest becomes a living archive. The pink path, which has appeared throughout this body of work, passes quietly through the trees like a seam between worlds. It is both a remembered path and a painted one, carrying the atmosphere of my first London bedsit, where Wales first began to return through paint.

Scattered among the trees are fragments from the Lewis family archive. Small photographs appear like quiet declarations within the branches, moments where the past interrupts the landscape and insists on being seen. They do not behave like framed documents in a museum. Instead, they hover and gather among trunks and shadows, as if the forest itself has begun to remember.

The trees hold these images lightly. They become temporary exhibition walls, memory structures where letters, stories and photographs settle for a moment before drifting again into narrative. The archive is not stable here; it grows, branches, and reshapes itself.

At the centre sits the cut trunk, its exposed rings marking time, interruption and survival. Around it, the forest continues its slow movement, leaning forward and backwards at the same time, entangling the past with the future.

This painting imagines the forest not simply as landscape but as a field of inheritance. The photographs of the Lewis family stand quietly among the trees, declaring their presence.

Stories do not disappear.

They change form. Sometimes they return as paths. Sometimes they return as paintings.

#contemporarypainting #künstler #contemporarycymru #forest #brynmyrddin by @robinmasonrobin

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7 months ago

This small painting is exploring the experience of reverie as it has emerged during the Whispers from Bryn Myrddin Residency, working in sustained dialogue with an archive of words, images, and fragments accumulated across generations. Reverie here is not escape, but a cognitive and emotional state — a drifting attention in which memory, affect, and imagination begin to intermingle.

The forest becomes a metaphor for this condition: dense, layered, and difficult to navigate. Hundreds of images and thousands of words press in at once, producing sudden shifts in tone — from joy to sadness, clarity to confusion. Letters float through the trees, moving between path and place, from and toward Bryn Myrddin, suggesting language in transit rather than fixed meaning. The archive does not unfold sequentially; it arrives in waves.

Flowing from one tree, a stream of coloured glass balls marks a particular memory held within this wider field. Around forty years ago, Debra and I had a studio on Bermondsey Street — then a working landscape of manufacturing and warehouses, heavy with the grey residue of its industrial past. One afternoon, a flatbed lorry swerved into a factory entrance opposite us. As it turned, a sack caught on ironwork and split open, releasing hundreds and thousands — a tide of colour spilling across road and pavement.

The sweets were destined for a chocolate factory, to be scattered over setting white chocolate and become sprinkled buttons. But on that day, they were released prematurely, washing through the street like a rainbow in shadow. The moment triggered an intense, childlike wonder — a reverie that has endured.

In this painting, that memory returns as material metaphor. At times, working with the archive feels like encountering a similar rupture: a tear in the sack where colour, emotion, and association spill out unexpectedly, allowing the present mind to mingle with those who came before.

Reverie becomes a method — not of control, but of attention

#contemporarypainting
#künstler
#contemporarycymru
#celfcymruarts
#brynmyrddin by @robinmasonrobin

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10 months ago

I finished this small study last night — thinking of my parents and their quiet, steadfast love as I continue to wrestle with the ache of losing them many years ago, and the unexpected joy of finding them again in the archive of their letters.

In these fragile papers, sadness and happiness drift together, suspended like the envelopes in the painting — hovering between presence and absence, memory and imagination.

Among the family letters linked to Bryn Myrddin are those exchanged between the Boy with the Monkey ( my father) and his childhood friend — the girl who would become my mother. 
Their words move gently from friendship into an early, tentative romance, revealing the intimacy we rarely allow ourselves to imagine in our parents — the tenderness they once lived so openly, before time rearranged them into the roles we later knew.

One letter ends with a lipstick kiss — a small, luminous imprint pressed across decades. It holds both warmth and a quiet heartbreak, reminding me that love, too, was an anchor during the war, binding two young lives across distance and fear:

“…I love you darling. All my fondest love, Joan XXX a nice big kiss for you xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx…”

Viewed through an archival lens, these letters are no longer simple mementoes. They are charged objects — carriers of latent emotional energy, holding the vibrations of hands that once folded them, breath that once dried the ink, hope that once sealed the envelope. They record tenderness under pressure, documenting how intimacy survives — not despite uncertainty, but within it.

And in this quiet residue of the archive — in these imperfect, improvised, enduring exchanges — I search for imagery that uses that language of love.

#contemporarypainting #Kunst #paitningshavefeelingsaswell #welshartist #brynmyrddin by @robinmasonrobin

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10 months ago