From: Don
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 22 November 2001
Boring but true. He draws better than he paints, his drawings of details from Cezanne are quite good. He can't paint and it doesn't matter if he can draw ok, one does not help the other necessarily.
His paintings look like he doesn't know how to fill in his drawings, like the marks are airbrushed on, tentative trying to be something like Cezanne but failing awfully. Everyone is embarrassed by his textual explanations side by side with his pictures, understandably embarrassed but the texts are braver and firmer than his paintings.
He is angry that the critics hated his Tate show, and he think they killed his wife, so he left London for California. Also very reasonable.
The other old men of boring British painting are on the vido accompanying the exhibtion damning R.B with faint praise. At least his painting have a little energy in their compositions and he does not repeat himself as badly as the rest.
His ideas are vulgar and his paintings generally weak but he is angry.
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