Robin Welch

Robin Welch was a painter and potter who studied at Penzance School of Art and worked with Michael Leach, son of Bernard, in St Ives, Cornwall. After National Service in the Parachute Regiment in Jordan and Cyprus, he studied at the Central School of Art in the 50s, when the new abstract expressionist American painters such as Rothko first showed in London, having a profound effect on students and teachers alike. After working in London and Australia, Welch set up his workshop in Suffolk in 1965, where he worked until his death in 2019, punctuated by visits, residencies, exhibitions and lecturing in Australia, New Zealand, the US and throughout Europe.

Welch’s works often contain both thrown and hand-worked elements and are then painted and fired multiple times to build up a depth of surface, texture and colour. They are abstract yet suggestive of place, of horizons and wild expanses, seas and deserts, of sun, stone and sand, treading the line between abstraction and representation.