"I love to reimagine places and tell visual stories. I invent narrative scenarios and characters within a cinematic context, involving myself with fake or reimagined mythology often borrowed from and celebrating the tropes found in late 20th-century science fiction film and tv. Although often highly complex compositions, often borrowing from the illustrator's device of the 'cutaway' where the viewer can see though buildings and objects to see how things work."
Born in Liverpool in 1964, Robbie Bushe grew up in Aberdeenshire UK before graduating in painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1990, and has since undertaken a career as an artist and art lecturer. He taught painting at Gray's School of Art, Aberdeen, was Head of Fine Art at the University of Chichester and has lectured at Kent Institute of Art and Design and Oxford Brookes University. Bushe returned to Scotland in 2007 to run short courses at Edinburgh College of Art. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and was elected as a member of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) in 2017.
Robbie has exhibited his narrative paintings since 1990. Inspired by the characters and the places where he has lived and worked, his work has won many national awards, including the inaugural W. Gordon Smith Painting Prize, and as a shortlisted prize-winner of the 2021 John Moores Painting Prize at the Walker Gallery Liverpool.
In 2023, he was a prize-winner at the Jackson Painting Prize, won the Highly Commended at the Contemporary British Painting Prize in Huddersfield as well as The City of Edinburgh Prize at the Scottish Landscape Award. In November 2023, Robbie was the inaugural winner of the RSA Blackadder Houston Mid-Career Painting Award, a £20,000 prize to enable a six-month sabbatical dedicated to making a new body of paintings in 2024.