Rob Miles

I make drawings, paintings and prints. My time at the RCA has been spent exploring the possibilities of different print making media, and how best my subjects can be put through these processes. I decided to specialise in lithography as it is the most direct translation from hand to final image, and also the most challenging!

I am interested in the potential of line and tone to create a diagrammatic image on the surface and also to carve out an illusion of depth, keeping this language in a state of tension with itself through a suspension in/on a neutral and spacious plane, and through interruptions and disturbances of pictorial registers.

Within this developing methodology, I am inspired by the history of picture making, in painting and the graphic arts, and its current manifestation in the languages of the computer interface: desktop displays, touchscreen skeuomorphics and the economy of illusion prevalent in contemporary visual communication.

These explorations are furthered through a balance of assiduous observational drawing and whimsical doodling; approaches which strengthen and inform each other through furthering confidence of line, gesture and texture of mark, and the translation of eye through mind to hand. It is in the internal questioning that arises in both these approaches that the heart of my interests lie – such questions as how can a mere scribble read as a figure? What happens to the reception of a sketch when there is evidence of erasure and alteration? What is the least I can delineate to the greatest effect? These and many other similar inquiries arise through the repeated application of drawing and are debated through the self same language.

I am particularly excited about lithography for its peculiarities, which I feel I can use to the advantage of my imagery, and for its demands, which forces me to really consider the structure and composition of the drawing in a very haptic fashion.