Robin Mason was born in Porthcawl, South Wales, in 1958. His practice moves between painting and writing, where autoethnography, folklore, landscape and art history begin to speak to one another.
In his recent body of work, Mason returns to Bryn Myrddin, his father’s place of birth, the family home in Alltwen, Pontardawe. The house is not simply remembered; it is entered. It breathes. It listens back. Working from photographs, letters, medals, tools, and fragments of spoken story, he treats the archive not as document but as dormant terrain. Under sustained attention, it stirs.
Forests grow through interior rooms. Books open as thresholds. Chains hang as both injury and care. A mischievous Monkey Spirit watches from the margins, ready to intervene. These are not illustrations of family history but presences that gather when memory is held long enough.A recurring pink ground saturates the work. It recalls the pink walls of his first London bedsit, where he began painting Wales from a distance, trying to stand in two places at once. That colour has become membrane and weather, a field where displacement, longing, and return coexist. It carries the atmosphere of beginning.
Before the First World War, Letitia, his grandmother, painted murals directly onto the walls of Bryn Myrddin, inviting landscape indoors while industry tore at the valleys beyond. Though the murals no longer remain, they continue to exhale through Mason’s surfaces. Landscape presses against architecture; interior and exterior fold into one another.
The paintings do not seek to reconstruct the past. They allow it to hover, to lean forward. Through layering, fragmentation, and symbolic recurrence, Mason’s work explores transmission: how stories move through generations, how labour and imagination entwine, and how painting might briefly hold what would otherwise drift.Here, reverie is not escape but method.
The archive does not close. It opens.
Alongside his studio work, Mason has developed an extended body of writing. His recent text: The Body of Painting, reflects on a long-standing entanglement with the work of Matthias Grünewald, work he has referenced and returned to for decades. Through fragments, reflections, and painterly meditations, the writing traces how that extraordinary image of transformation, and material intensity continues to reverberate within his own practice.
Between 1977 and 1984 Mason studied painting at Cardiff College of Art, Wolverhampton Polytechnic (BA Hons) and the Royal College of Art (MA RCA), after which he established a studio in London. He has continued to exhibit nationally and internationally, and his work can be found in public and significant private and corporate collections, including the Royal College of Art Collection, Simmons & Simmons, Government Art Collection, London Transport Collection. Cleveland County Council, Leicestershire Education Authority, London Underground, Rosehaugh Stanhope Plc. Unilever & TI Group (Collections sold at Sotheby’s)
2025 studio interview about the work exhibited at the National Eisteddfor in Wrexham