15/10/2026
Today’s theme is contemporary portraiture for Club Culture Cumbria at The Armitt. We’ve chosen a beloved artist here at BAM, Val Robinson’s self-portrait, Early Morning for today! 💞
The piece is one of a series painted for an exhibition held in Leeds in 1991, called Woman in Mind. In the painting, her physical appearance is not the artist’s main concern. Val Robinson spoke about this in 1991:
“I start out by looking at the reflection before me in a mirror and what might seem to begin as an ordinary portrait extends beyond the me I see, reaching out into society and to the environments which have touched me before and surround me now. What has at one time been the idea of a portrait vanishes. Those pre-conceived ideas of self-portraiture dissolve beneath the physicality and invasion of social structures and stigmas. The act of painting combines with years and years of circumstances - combines with the life and learning of an individual who is in there amongst others.”
🖼️ Val Robinson (1944-2022), Early Morning, oil on canvas, c1989.
