Swansea Print Workshop fine art studio

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Robert Macdonald

Background
Robert was born in Britain in 1935 but his family lost their home in the Second World War and they emigrated to New Zealand in 1945. He trained as a journalist in New Zealand but returned to Britain to study art at the London Central School. Throughout most of the 1960s he worked in journalism in Fleet Street, writing on foreign affairs, but went as a mature student to study painting for three years at the Royal College of Art in 1976, and in the 1980s took a diploma in advanced printmaking techniques at the Central School. In 1989 Bloomsbury published his book, The Fifth Wind, about New Zealand and the Maoris. He illustrated the book with his own linocuts. He was commissioned by the Old Stile Press to create a series of woodcuts for a book on John Donnes romantic poetry, published in 2004 with the title, Where Many Shipwrack. His etchings are represented in the print collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum and in other public collections. He was elected Chair of the Welsh Group, Wales’ senior association of professional artists, in 2007 (for three years) and he is a director of the Swansea Print Workshop.

Artist's Statement
As a painter and printmaker living in rural Wales for the past 20 years Robert has drawn inspiration from the landscape, the agricultural life and the legends of his area of the Brecon Beacons, but his art is also an inner exploration, frequently driven by promptings of the imagination and the unconscious.