STATEMENT

I am inspired to create paintings that express my individual and acquired painting ideas. I want to see the paint texture foremost, while simultaneously feeling the colour areas expand out and then recede into space. I introduce textures to slow down my perception so the surface of the canvas appears to undulate .

It is most gratifying when I’m invited to exhibit my large oil paintings in an open gallery space. Out of the studio I get to see the paintings at a greater distance under alternative lighting conditions. Qualities of surface movement and visual space and depth become more obvious and interesting.  It has been enlightening for me to see how these paintings create a tangible connection to the moment, and it raises my awareness to the possibilities that lie ahead for me in the studio.

“Talent is given, and there’s not a moment to waste, to believe it, to accept it, and to make something of this life.  Art doesn’t care where you begin, it is a series of new beginnings, that can have surprise endings.”  Robin Hollingdrake

BIOGRAPHY

Robin was born in 1953 in the western suburbs of Toronto in what was then Port Credit / Clarkson and is now Mississauga. Her art education was immediate with constant encouragement from her mother, Patience Morrisey a graduate of the Ontario College of Art, who kept a very active painting, print making, and ceramics studio going. Her grand mother Mabel Harris was a gifted painter and draughts person schooled at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, England. Robin's sister Catherine Morrsiey is a landscape painter and has a signifcant profile in the arts community in London, Ontario. Suburban 1960's Toronto, hardly a hot bed of arts activity, but Robin's upbringing and exposure to the arts was total immersion.

Robin graduated 1971, T.L. Kennedy Secondary School with the David L. Stevenson Award for Commercial Art. At the time the high school ran an arts program for those students identified in the Peel Region with special gifts. She attended the Ontario College of Art from 1971 to 1973 and won the Reeves and Sons Scholarship Award in 1972. With the upheavels at OCA during the period she transferred to Sherdian College School of Crafts and Design and graduated in 1978 from the Ceramics Program.

Robin has stayed in the Mississauga area with her husband where they brought up their two boys. She has been very active over the years within the community and has taken full advantage of the what Mississauga and the neighbouring communities have had to offer with respect to the arts. Robin has been able to both teach and exhibit her works on a regular basis.