Robert Priseman - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Robert Priseman is a British artist. Born in Derbyshire

Derbyshire

Derbyshire is a county in the East Midlands of England. A substantial portion of the Peak District National Park lies within Derbyshire. The northern part of Derbyshire overlaps with the Pennines, a famous chain of hills and mountains. The county contains within its boundary of approx...

, United Kingdom

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

in 1965 Priseman read Aesthetics and Art Theory at the University of Essex

University of Essex

The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. Established in 1963 and receiving its Royal Charter in 1965...

under art theorist Professor Michael Podro. Priseman began his working life as a book design

Book design

Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various components of a book into a coherent whole....

er for Longman Publishers from 1989-92. Whilst there he started painting portrait

Portrait

thumb|250px|right|Portrait of [[Thomas Jefferson]] by [[Rembrandt Peale]], 1805. [[New-York Historical Society]].A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expression is predominant. The intent is to display the likeness,...

s in oils

Oil painting

Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...

. Sitters from this period include His Holiness the Dalai Lama, His Grace the Duke of Atholl

Duke of Atholl

Duke of Atholl, alternatively Duke of Athole, named after Atholl in Scotland, is a title in the Peerage of Scotland held by the head of Clan Murray...

, Phil Collins

Phil Collins

Philip David Charles "Phil" Collins, LVO is an English singer-songwriter, drummer, pianist and actor best known as a drummer and vocalist for British progressive rock group Genesis and as a solo artist....

, Jeremy Paxman

Jeremy Paxman

Jeremy Dickson Paxman is a British journalist, author and television presenter. He has worked for the BBC since 1977. He is noted for a forthright and abrasive interviewing style, particularly when interrogating politicians...

, Lord Condon

Paul Condon, Baron Condon

Paul Leslie Condon, Baron Condon, QPM, DL, FRSA is a retired British police officer. He was the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1993 to 2000.-Education:...

, The Marquess of Northampton

Marquess of Northampton

Marquess of Northampton is a title that has been created twice.-William Parr:First creation, 1547–1571The title was created for the first time in the Peerage of England in 1547 in favour of William Parr, brother of Catherine Parr, the sixth and last wife of King Henry VIII. The title was forfeited...

, Sir Eric Mensforth, Lord and Lady Johnston and Cardinal Basil Hume with work being held in public collections including The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and Cranfield University.

In 2004 Priseman gave up portrait painting and began work on the ‘Hospital’, ‘Subterraneans’, and ‘The Francis Bacon Interiors’ series of paintings. The ‘Subterraneans’ series took their primary source from the 1977 album ‘Low’ by David Bowie

David Bowie

David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...

. Painted over the course of 2004–2006, the images depict spaces such as train station

Train station

A train station, also called a railroad station or railway station and often shortened to just station,"Station" is commonly understood to mean "train station" unless otherwise qualified. This is evident from dictionary entries e.g...

s, underground walkway

Walkway

In US English, a walkway is a composite or umbrella term for all engineered surfaces or structures which support the use of trails. These include sidewalks, footbridges, stiles, stairs, ramps, paseos or tunnels...

s and waiting room

Waiting room

A waiting room is a building, or more commonly a part of a building where people sit or stand until the event they are waiting for occurs.There are generally two types of waiting room. One is where individuals leave one at a time, for instance at a doctor's office or a hospital, or outside a school...

s. The ‘Hospital’ series was also painted between 2004-6, with the work drawing on a renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

understanding of perspective and architectural forms influenced by the art deco

Art Deco

Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

movement. These works were first exhibited at Derby Museums and Art Gallery in 2007, being shown as a tie-in with the Joseph Wright collection.

The Francis Bacon Interiors

‘The Francis Bacon Interiors' were painted between 2006–2008 and depict the Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

hotel room where Francis Bacon lover and muse George Dyer committed suicide, the room in a catholic hospital in Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

where Bacon himself died and a series of studios where he painted. Priseman worked on an 'In Conversation' text with the art critic and curator, Michael Peppiatt

Michael Peppiatt

Michael Peppiatt is an art critic, author and art historian.Peppiatt graduated from Cambridge University in 1964, and joined The Observer as art critic. He then went to Paris to take up an editorial job at Réalités magazine, where he remained until 1969, when he was appointed arts editor at Le Monde...

which accompanied the series. The paintings were exhibited at the University of Essex in 2007 and alongside work by Bacon at Huddersfield Art Gallery in 2009.

No Human Way to Kill

In 2007 Priseman developed the project 'No Human Way to Kill' out of the 'Hospital' series. 'No Human Way to Kill' was exhibited in London and New York in 2010 and again in 2011. The series of paintings presents a detached position to the five different methods of execution used in the USA which include Hanging, Firing Squad, Gassing, Lethal Injection and Electrocution. Alongside the paintings, twelve etchings look at other methods of state sanctioned execution which have been used around the world, including the Guillotine and Garrotte. The series examined how different countries have adopted different techniques to execute condemned prisoners, which in turn argue execution to be a socially constructed act of group catharsis.

During the New York shows, live debates around the issues explored were streamed to universities across the USA and Canada which included Yale, Columbia, Arizona University, the University of Minnesota and the Cleveland Institute of Art. No Human Way to Kill is used for many educational purposes including training for Amnesty International and European schools education.

A book on the work and ideas surrounding it was published by the Seabrook Press in collaboration with the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex and Amnesty International in 2009. The book presents different points of view to the topic. It opens with an account from Reverend Cathy Harrington whose daughter Leslie Mazzara was lost to murder

Murder

Murder is the unlawful killing, with malice aforethought, of another human being, and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide...

. Cathy negotiated a life sentence for her daughter’s murderer, who had potentially been facing the death sentence. This is followed by an overview of life on death row in San Quentin

San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin State Prison is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men in unincorporated San Quentin, Marin County, California, United States. Opened in July 1852, it is the oldest prison in the state. California's only death row for male inmates, the largest...

from former Crips

Crips

The Crips are a primarily, but not exclusively, African American gang. They were founded in Los Angeles, California, in 1969 mainly by Raymond Washington and Stanley Williams...

gang member Anthony Ross. Then former Texas

Texas

Texas is the second largest U.S. state by both area and population, and the largest state by area in the contiguous United States.The name, based on the Caddo word "Tejas" meaning "friends" or "allies", was applied by the Spanish to the Caddo themselves and to the region of their settlement in...

prison Warden Jim Willett who oversaw 89 executions gives a detailed account of how an execution is carried out.

Gas Chambers

Following 'No Human Way to Kill' Priseman produced the 'Gas Chambers' series. This project comes in two parts and focuses on the developmental steps taken in Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany , also known as the Third Reich , but officially called German Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Greater German Reich from 26 June 1943 onward, is the name commonly used to refer to the state of Germany from 1933 to 1945, when it was a totalitarian dictatorship ruled by...

that began with the gassing of the mentally ill

Mental illness

A mental disorder or mental illness is a psychological or behavioral pattern generally associated with subjective distress or disability that occurs in an individual, and which is not a part of normal development or culture. Such a disorder may consist of a combination of affective, behavioural,...

and ended in genocide

Genocide

Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...

. The first part consists of six pencil drawings which are designed to look like hand coloured postcards and show the outsides of the hospitals in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

and Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

where the T4 Euthanasia programme

Action T4

Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's eugenics-based "euthanasia" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"...

took place between 1939 and 1941.

The second part of this project consists of five oil paintings (each 6 ft x 9 ft). The paintings trace the movement taken by the Nazis towards an industrialised killing process which resulted in Auschwitz

Auschwitz concentration camp

Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...

where up to 2,500 people were killed at a time. The series is accompanied by an essay entitled 'On Robert Prisman and the Possibility of Painting' by the curator and art historian Professor Peter Vergo.

Omagh

In 2010 Priseman produced two paintings on the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland. 'Omagh'. Each painting in the 'Omagh' set shows a view of Market Street in Omagh

Omagh

Omagh is the county town of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. It is situated where the rivers Drumragh and Camowen meet to form the Strule. The town, which is the largest in the county, had a population of 19,910 at the 2001 Census. Omagh also contains the headquarters of Omagh District Council and...

, one looking up and one looking down the road. The first is based on a photograph taken just before the explosion

Omagh bombing

The Omagh bombing was a car bomb attack carried out by the Real Irish Republican Army , a splinter group of former Provisional Irish Republican Army members opposed to the Good Friday Agreement, on Saturday 15 August 1998, in Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Twenty-nine people died as a...

which was found in rubble after the event. The second is based on a video still and shows a view up Market Street towards Omagh Courthouse and depicts the scene just after the explosion.

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