Tobit Roche

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tobit spent his early childhood in Hong Kong and Canada. His teenage years were spent in India, where he attended the American International School. Art school followed at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto and at Camberwell College of Art in London.

 

Tobit works mostly in oils, both in the studio and en plein air, and has recently expanded his practice to include printmaking. His time is divided between India, London and St Leonards-on-Sea where he lives and works. Tobit’s en plein air paintings and sketches are often the starting point for larger studio works that incorporate memory and imagination, leading to mystical imagery which is then extrapolated further into pure abstraction. The process is one of distillation and accumulated judgements, made instinctively from a vision deep within the heart and mind.

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“I have been under the spell of India since my teenage years in Delhi. It became, and continues to be, my spiritual home. In India, painting en plein air has its challenges, but the satisfaction it gives makes it a rich and meaningful experience. Apart from the pleasure of sitting on a hilltop in Rajasthan or the Himalaya, it is the spirituality of the land which inspires me. Perhaps there is something that flows from the resilience of its people and its culture which makes India so compelling and inspirational for an artist. My Indian paintings are about a kind of longing. I show a view of India that is intensely personal and based on an emotional reaction to that country.”

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“Tobit Roche’s paintings contain a sense of mystery and calm, as if he might have enclosed a secret between the paint and canvas. Rather than displaying human figures, he inflects emotions in topography: for instance, a hill that seems like a curled animal, or the uplift of a peak to a possibly magical point, or a landscape peopled in its way by trees and peaks. Even his paintings of mountains are never cold. Blue and purple-bluebell hues take the eye of the seer from the hills to whitish peaks, and a spiritual, Roerichian transcendence.”