Robert William Sinclair

Robert William Sinclair

Robert William Sinclair, painter (b at Saltcoats, Sask 9 Feb 1939). Sinclair continued his art studies at the universities of Manitoba and Iowa and taught at the University of Alberta from 1965 to 1996. He has developed a unique and distinctly western Canadian theme in his landscape paintings and sculpture. In many of his best-known works, he has used the symbol of a highway as a familiar shape to draw the eye into a simplified 2-dimensional composition. The painted-road device gives an immediate illusion of space, yet this is counterbalanced by strongly drawn linear elements and paradoxical unpainted areas that flatten the space. Sinclair's landscapes portray connections between 2 observed states or combinations of elements such as sky, hills and mountain peaks. Drawing has dominated all of his work - watercolours, canvases and his hand-formed Plexiglas landscape sculptures-and his recent paintings incorporate floating landscapes with unpainted foregrounds evoking a sense of the spiritual. Subject matter ranges from the botanic to the many aspects of landscape: waterfalls, icebergs, mountains, sun and moon and deep skies.