Ronald Forbes is a painter and film-maker.
Biographical overview
Ronald Forbes has had around fifty solo exhibitions and two and three person shows in venues such as the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow, Project Art Centre, Dublin, Drian Galleries, London, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Sonia Zaks Gallery, Chicago, Galerie Trace, Maastricht, Plimsoll Gallery Hobart, and the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh.
His paintings are held in public collections in the UK, Ireland, USA, Poland and Australia, as well as private collections internationally.
He has had a distinguished career in higher education, and was Head of Painting at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, Dundee until devoting all of his time to his studio practice in 2002. Earlier in his career he was also Head of Painting at Crawford School of Art, Cork and an Influential lecturer at Glasgow School of Art.
He is an academician of the Royal Scottish Academy, an elected member the Royal Glasgow institute of the Fine Arts and an elected professional member of the Society of Scottish Artists.
A fulsomely illustrated book, A Blind Man’s Dreams: The Paintings and Films of Ronald Forbes, by Dr Tom Normand was published in December 2021.
Statement of Practice
The art of Ronald Forbes forms a narrative around the way we see and understand the world. It is about illusion, belief and reality – and the fuzzy edges between these.
Forbes’s work – paintings, drawings, prints and films - displays a tremendous virtuosity and high levels of craftsmanship that is admired within the art world and engages viewers world-wide. The figurative quality, the apparent realism of the work, first attracts and then engages the viewer in an imaginative dialogue. Forbes has devised a language of faux or illusionistic collage that allows the use of elements or fragments of images, which at first appear familiar and coherent, but on closer inspection reveal their disparate sources, and their new reality.
In this exhibition we find one of the Everyman paintings, which formed a solo exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in 2023, and current works that signal the start of a new series, where the human presence, depicted by collaged outer garments, interacts with Nature. Here Nature is realised as floral arrangements that reference the historical tradition of flower painting.