Masks in wild landscapes, derelict buildings, demolition projects and disused public lavatories. The grotesque body, unsealed and in process. Anxiety, symbols, dreams, myths and nightmares. Paintings, cartoons, videos and performances that are hard to see, frustrating or have to be climbed up to. Unanswerable questions, carnival and death.
I am a childish and very old artist living in Bristol and Oxford. I paint my dreams, private stories, myth, fairy tales and religion. I work with my early life and culture (anxious, suburban, bourgeois, Anglican, but secretly loving) and I engage with theorists such as Sigmund Freud (the unconscious impulses of sex and death), Carl Jung (archetypes and the collective unconscious buried in myth and dreams), Mikhail Bakhtin (the polarity of the sealed perfected classical and the wild grotesque of carnival), Julia Kristeva (Freudian insights on the “abject” and melancholia), and Keith Johnstone (Improvisation and mask.) I like the work of William Blake, Marc Chagall, Paula Rego, Hyon Gyon, Siobhan Wall, John Glashan, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Peter Greenaway, Paolo Uccello, R.D.Lang, Sergei Yakunin, Monster Chetwyn, William Kentridge and Derek Jarman.
I like human bodies which I place in mythical or archetypal settings. They are like a conversation with myself and with my unconscious. Clear conclusions elude me and I am drawn to unanswerable questions. For example, I used painting to ascertain my existence or non-existence and maybe question these very concepts. This is not to examine habitual ideas but to side-step them. Jacques Lacan observes, “The ego is made up of privileged images and the task of analysis is to dissolve them.” What images arise from beyond my rational left-brain stock of habitual pictures? My approach to this impossible question is naïve. I am more interested in play than in mature rigor. I paint with watercolour, gouache and ink on paper, oil on canvas or plywood, and endless sketchbooks. Sometimes I combine these into monumental books, one of which also contains holy relics, archives and masks, all of which I invite the viewer to handle and desecrate.
Robert Mills: Artist, Painter and Fool 