Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given to them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures. – John Ruskin

This quote, from the Victorian artist and critic, John Ruskin, could well have been written about Robert Doble. His art has always depicted and celebrated the Natural world. It comes as no surprise, then, that Doble has recently relocated from the city to the leafy solitude of rural settings, where such artistic inspirations are in abundance daily. As an artist, Doble has often directly responded to his immediate surroundings, and, in his new country habitat, he has found satisfying artistic revelations. These paintings of birds, flowers, cats, and figures, which populate this new body of work, seem positively glowing with fresh air, space, and a new optimism. These are the works of a senior artist who is reflecting not only on his past pictures, but also responding directly to his new environmental experiences.

Doble has always been at ease in mixing abstraction and figuration, which he does with thrilling exuberance in this exhibition, taking his considerable repertoire and mastery of painterly techniques to new heights of sophistication. The ease with which he slides and skids his brushes across the various surface is exciting to witness. Everything in these paintings is multiplied, multi-layered, repeated, overlapped, in a kind of freeform expression of Natural forces. We may be reminded of the story of Jackson Pollock who, when asked why he didn’t paint Nature, replied, ‘I am Nature!’ Under Doble’s brushes we can see a comparable, stream of consciousness channelling of Nature.

Flowers are a prominent motif throughout the exhibition. Depicted by Doble’s frenetic, floating lines, these manic blooms barely contain the energetic life-force which seem to burst out of them. Doble has harnessed the very forces of Nature in his fluid marks and painterly flourishes, revealing the exuberance and tenacity of all living things. Here I return to John Ruskin, who wrote that the meekest weed in the garden should be as revered as the most prized rose in the greenhouse – in fact, it is the weed that shows greater tenacity than the pampered rose, because, against all the odds, it desperately clings to the barest scrap of earth, in the humblest of surroundings.

Human figures appear in other works, which are treated with the same joyous abandon as the flowers. Archetypal heads emerge from energetic grounds, or else seem to be about to submerge back into abstraction – like a passing thought, suddenly crystalised and held forever in a new form. Doble has likened this to falling asleep, and then waking suddenly to a new, unexpected reality. We may also approach this exhibition as a new reality.

I began this essay with a quote from an eminent Victorian. I close it with an apt quote from another eminent Victorian – Oscar Wilde – with which I am sure Robert Doble would certainly agree: ‘With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?’