SEVERE dyslexia blighted Fremantle artist Robin Warren’s school days. Suffering daily at the hands of bullies he withdrew into his own world, where art was a bright light in dark hours.
“We went through so much hell in school in London,” mother and art manager Jennifer Warren says.
A move to WA was life-changing when Fremantle artist Tania Ferrier discovered and encouraged Warren’s natural artistic talent.
“I was found to be pretty good at it in high school,” Warren tells the Herald modestly.
Ferrier gave him his first big break, taking some of his art to colleagues at Artspace Gallery, where they were snapped up.
“Tania recognised and fostered what she called his ‘unique vision’…a phrase reiterated by the curators of The Irish Museum of Modern Art a few years later,” Mrs Warren says.
Warren’s works grace the walls of the IMMA, in Dublin, and famed Irish musician James Galway has a couple in his collection. They’re also in collections in Switzerland, the USA, UK and Australia, including the WA Law Courts.
And he received a Queen’s Trust grant for one of his works to be translated into a tapestry by the Victorian Tapestry Workshop, Melbourne.
The winner of the 1996 WA Citizen of the Year Youth Award, was dubbed an “outsider artist” during an exhibition in London, a reference to self-taught or naive artists.
Large faces dominate his early engagingly, quirky abstract paintings, “faces within faces” and “upside down faces”.
An interest in celtic mythology influenced his more recent ones, sparked by a radio program on Keats and his poem The Song of Wandering with its words “the golden apples of the sun and the silver apples of the moon”, which feature in some of Warren’s art.
“I looked it up on the computer and found out about Yeats, and coincidently he was into mythology too,” he says.
“I write some of his poems into my art works.”
This year marks a 20 year retrospective of the artist’s work, with an exhibition at Freight Gallery, Beach Street, East Fremantle, Friday March 11–April 10.
by JENNY D’ANGER
