Carole Robb was born in Port Glasgow in 1943, attended school in Greenock and then Glasgow Art School from 1961-1965. She left soon thereafter and has enjoyed a successful career in New York, Rome and London. Her May 2025 exhibition is the first one she’s held in the UK for 42 years, and we’re delighted to have the opportunity to present it here, especially as it’s introduced so eloquently by Mark Pulsford

Only The Angels

Solo gli angeli possono salvarci ora – Only the angels can save us now; with this wryly fatalistic aphorism the Venetians contemplate the mortality of their city.

Carole Robb, the Scottish painter who has spent many months in Venice recording the life and tides of La Serenissima has heard it often. High water has never been higher; the low tides now fail to cleanse the canals and rias the way they used to, and violent currents threaten the age-old foundations. The future shrinks for the great city on the lagoon, and Robb bears witness to the peril of the rising water, making painting after painting addressing the city, its inhabitants and the water.

A cameriere with a tray of drinks and an angel are both ankle-deep in rising water. Between them, the painter’s dog, Laddie, the hero of her childhood, stands ever ready to save the day. The waiter and the dog are washed with moonlight, the angel is celestially lit. Through the window is seen a warm interior, with two denizens of the Caffè Florian, that legendary Venetian institution, mirroring the figures without: the radiant woman, the saturnine man. The painting is strongly atmospheric of unrevealed consequence, of fate in the process of determination. As multi-layered as a piece of theatre, as nuanced as a poem, as resistant to interpretation as a piece of music, Moonlight Cocktails is a haunting thing, an image, an invention, a story.  Robb herself says that she works from perception and observation: “My paintings are not just about reality, they’re somewhere between the actuality of a scene and invention.”

Robb has made portraits of a group of beautiful young men, her Heads of Gondoliers. These individuals did not sit self-consciously as models. They were observed as they waited for the next booking, analysed and understood by an artist’s eye possessed of an accuity achieved through a lifetime of practice. Robb has spoken of her training, the discipline instilled in her in the life room at the Glasgow School of Art, which evolved to be the defining principle of her art, her modus operandi for actualising visual experience, for converting perception into record, and then beyond record into (re-) invention. She has spoken also of focusing memory as a contributor to the process of seeing. These are the hard ways of art, open only to the few possessed of a trilogy of co-incidence: to have the talent in the first place, and then the determination to justify that talent through endless work. This first pair and then the third, by chance, to have encountered the absolute discipline of the old-fashioned Drawing School, a grounding unavailable to most art students in Scotland since the 1970s.

Robb is an artist belonging to the ancient traditions of the limner’s calling, yet her sensibilities are urgently contemporary. Robb’s particular distinction is that she is alive and productive right now, an artist-inventionist aware of her great fore-runners, speaking to us all and telling us the stories of our own hubris, represented by the extraordinary spectacle of immaculate, gilded Venice slipping inexorably towards over-closure by the sea. 

In another painting, the largest of seven works in oil (it is a diptych measuring 9’ x 5’ 6”), The Grand Canal has become a vast limpid pool of aquamarine with boats and many swimmers, including one diving man, painted with the style-signature used by classical painters to denote athletes – this one is a direct visual reference to the mysterious figure of a diver from tomb painting in Paestum (La Tomba del Tuffatore), where the diver’s plunge is said to denote the passage from life to death. Elsewhere, the stranded child and desperately protective mother, transcribed from Tintoretto’s Massacre of the Innocents, evoke the struggle to resist horrific fate, but also the inadequacy of our love to shield our children. From above the arc of suicide is traced, to the left, innocence betrayed. And water. A third large-scale painting, Stato da Màr (Empire of the Sea), presents a nocturnal vision of Venice entirely dominated by a mass of dark water, and is the title-piece of the show.

Water, ubiquitous in Venice, seemingly amorphous yet possessed of form, sometimes translucent, sometimes opaque, made up of layers of independently energetic matter, makes up both negative and positive space in Robb’s paintings. 

For each one of the works in oil Robb has engaged in a multitude of research on a portable scale using watercolour.. Each one evokes not just location but time; and each picture draws us into the mind-frame of the working artist. Anyone who has ever been transported on a late-night water-bus along the Grand Canal will see in Vaporetto Stop S Toma an evocation so complete as to feel the beads of fog on one’s eyebrows again and to hear the suck-suck sound a boat’s wake makes as its energy is absorbed by the floating jetty.

Finally – a unique piece – Robb has painted the Grand Canal not as an oil painting this time, but in watercolour on a narrow 20-inch scroll of palest green Japanese paper, as fine and as sheer as silk. This work encountered severe obstacles – once the entire piece, almost finished, was blown into the water by a gust of wind. Robb watched the delicate pigment dissolve. The remade painting is over 20 feet long and is shown for the first time in the UK along with the rest of Robb’s Venetian Series.

Mark Pulsford

Carole Robb, Moonlight Cocktails, oil_canvas, 4ft.6ins. x 5ft, 2024

Carole Robb, The Grand Canal, oil on canvas, diptych 9ft x 5ft, 2022

Carole Robb, Stato da Mar, oil on canvas, 3ft 6 ins x 9 ft, 2023

Carole Robb, Head of A Gondolier 1, oil on canvas, 23 x 30cm, 2021

Carole Robb, Head of a Gondolier 3, oil on canvas, 23 x 30cm, 2024

Carole Robb, Last Stop San Michele, oil on canvas, 3ft 6ins x 9 ft, 2022

Carole Robb, Woman and Traghetto, oil on canvas, 3ft 6ins x 9 ft, 2022

Carole Robb, Postmistress Collecting Mail, oil on canvas, diptych 3ft 6ins x 9ft, 2023

Carole Robb, The Four Horsemen, oil on canvas, 4ft 6ins x 5ft, 2024

Carole Robb’s watercolour notebook: Venice as the waters rise

What is promised by watercolour?  Truth and beauty; the compelling beauty of truth conveyed.   No medium demands greater felicity to the act of witnessing an instant.  Nowhere is uncertainty of hand betrayed so ruinously; nowhere is the practised hand, eye and brain of the artist given to such instant illumination.   Here is early morning Venice; here Venice at the dead of night; over there, a masked face emerges from the gloom on Carnivale. Look West at sunset, out over the lagoon. Look towards the heart of the city hours before sunrise, when the last of the heat of the previous day still makes the bricks warm to the touch. Robb's witnessing of Venice is based upon perceived truth and made with such felicity that we understand exactly how each instant must have been, and in recognising truth we experience it as beauty.

Alongside the 'notebook' of record:  a monumental piece over 20 feet long, a frieze-form scroll painted with the same lightness of touch as the smaller pieces.  Painted with exactly the same limited, earth based palette from start to finish (a brown which hints at purple, a pink which has descended towards umber) upon Japanese paper itself the pale greenish blue colour of mistle-thrush eggs, Grand Canal / watercolour provides a vision of the deserted Venice of Robb's dawn vigil, with ghosts as company.

Mark Pulsford

Carole Robb, 7am Grand Canal, watercolour on paper, 46 x 56cm, 2022

Carole Robb, Carnivale Mask 1, watercolour on paper, 14 x 18cm, 2023

Carole Robb, Fatal Doomed Beauty, watercolour on paper, 56 x 76cm, 2023

Carole Robb, Gold Hair Mask, watercolour on paper, 30 x 48cm, 2023

Carole Robb, Here Comes Torcello, watercolour on paper, 61 x 86cm, 2022

Carole Robb, La Salute at Midnight, watercolour on paper, 45 x 56cm, 2024

Carole Robb, La Salute at Sundown, watercolour on paper, 50 x 50cm, 2024

Carole Robb, Out on the Town, watercolour on paper, 61 x 86cm, 2023

Carole Robb, The Arsenale, watercolour on paper, 22 x 30cm, 2024

Carole Robb, The Giudecca from Giardino, watercolour on paper, 30 x 38cm, n.d

Carole Robb, sitting in front of her Grand Canal scroll, 16 inches x 20 feet, watercolour on paper, in situ at University Women’s Club, London, May 2025

Carole Robb, detail from Grand Canal Scroll

With thanks to Mark Pulsford for making this art-scot Exhibition possible.