Meet Graham Robinson

Graham Robinson was born in Ottawa in 1987 and from a very early age he was making art. He attended Canterbury High School’s visual arts program before moving to Toronto to study art and illustration at Sheridan College and Ontario College of Art and Design. He has made Toronto his home since 2009, where he pursues his passion for art. He has participated in several solo and group exhibitions, including a two-month show at The Trace Gallery, Zurich.

Robinson’s images present a world beyond urban civilization—intense, wild landscapes that his figures explore by canoe or on foot in search of deeper meaning in their life and deeper connection with their environment.

The human challenge reflected in his work is not overcoming wilderness, but coming to terms with it. And in so doing, developing as individuals.

Robinson draws his subject matter from his memories of weeks- and months-long northern canoe trips he undertook as a teenager, during which a group would travel great distances by canoe across Ontario, Quebec and The Northwest Territories. These exhilarating experiences gave him a resource to mine as an adult—a backdrop he now populates with figures and talismans from his personal life.

His colour range of acrylic paint relies heavily on primary colours, allowing him to work as directly and expressively as possible, as does working in chalk pastel. The resulting aesthetic is intense and charged, illustrating inner conflict with one’s own ego and sense of personal strength and ownership of his faults as well as virtues.

Much of the inspiration and insight behind Robinson’s recent work is informed by the teachings of Cynic and Stoic philosophers such as Diogenes and Seneca, as well as modern thinkers like John K Samson, David Goggins, Sam Harris and Jocko Willink. A common theme in his work—albeit typically implicit—is “Memory of the Future” where future possibilities intertwine with past realities. This focus derives directly from the artist’s own struggles with deep depression and abuse of drugs and alcohol, and his realization that man has the potential to suffer or flourish at the mercy—or power—of his own reconciliation with his past.

Thus, the northern canoe trips in much of Robinson’s works are exploratory voyages without a specific destination, but guided always by the ideal of a mind and body seeking unity, and a human being finding comfort, meaning and happiness.