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Robert Senior: Imaginative oil paintings shaped by memory.
Explore the imaginative oil paintings of Surrey-based artist Robert Senior, shaped by memory psychology and spirituality.
ROBERT SENIOR
Artist's Biography
Artist's Biography
Artist's Biography
Robert Senior is a Surrey based artist working predominantly in oils. His paintings emerge from imagination, memory and lived experience, combining autobiographical, psychological and spiritual themes.
He exhibited with the New English Art Club in 2025 and 2026. He was also longlisted for The prestigious 2026 Contemporary Painting Prize. In 2025 he was shortlisted and exhibited online with The Almanara Painting Prize and was shortlisted for the Chaiya Art prize in 2023. He took part in the Turps Painting Correspondence Course between 2023-2025.
He was a Jacksons Painting Prize winner (Category Award) 2022 and shortlisted for the Lynn Painter-Stainers Award (2018). In 2019, Robert had a solo exhibition at the Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere and in 2021, a solo exhibition at The Lightbox in Woking. Amongst the group exhibitions in which he has taken part, he has previously been selected for the ING Discerning Eye and ROI exhibitions at the Mall Galleries.
He has also completed several Church commissions including a set of murals covering 56 square metres.
Robert has been strongly influenced by the Romanesque sculptor Gislebertus and Stanley Spencer, both of whom depicted their themes playfully and yet movingly, with an affection for humanity.
Robert was born in Surrey where he currently lives and works.
He studied at W.S.C.A.D and Exeter University.
Artist's Statement
Artist's Biography
Artist's Biography
A vivid and significant early childhood memory was of feeling the wind forcing its way up between the black stained sitting-room floorboards and seeing it lift and ripple the carpet square in front of the fireplace. A dawning awareness of a possible world beneath the floor, an invisible reality beyond the boundaries of my perceived and accepted world yet running through the surface of the everyday struck me. The question of what lies beneath the surface of the everyday runs through my painting, driving my need to paint and informs the way I experience life today.
Initially I play with gouache or pencil on paper. If what emerges feels powerful or significant in some way, I will explore it further in oil paint. For me, the ability of oil paint to be reworked, helps ideas to be revealed and refined.
I am an intuitive rather than intellectual painter, drawing naturally on memory and imagination rather than from observational sources, so that unexpected imagery and meaning can emerge freely.
Some paintings are simply imagined, while others are recollections of actual events, others still a mixture of both.
This alongside the experience of living and working with people living on the margins of society and working within the mental health sector has profoundly affected my sense of the world and the values that inform my work.