A Breathing Abstraction: A Conversation with Yasmine Robinson

Chromatic colours and thick strokes bulge and stretch beyond the canvas. Yasmine Robinson's works refuse to be fully contained. They pulse with animated energy. An abstraction that breathes. Luscious vermillions, grass greens, and moody blacks swell. Born in Derry in 1994 and now an artist and lecturer at Belfast School of Art, Robinson is carving her path in contemporary painting - one that is tactile, where the optical collides in lush and vivid gestures.

Robinson's work has been widely exhibited, from group shows at Frieze London and the MAC Belfast to solo exhibitions like Potluck at Coups Contemporary in London. After graduating from Ulster University (2017), she pursued an MA at Chelsea College of Art, later winning the Tiffany & Co. Outset Studio Makers Prize. As a lecturer, she contributes to shaping the next generation of artists, encouraging experimentation and giving space to the painting process between each brushstroke.

For Robinson, colour seems never merely visual. It's a substance to be stuffed, draped, and stirred across and over the edges of the canvas. Robinson’s compositions - combining oil, acrylic, emulsion, and spray paint with nylon, faux fur, and found objects - exist in a limbo between painting and sculpture. These compositions suggest a world where hue has mass and appetite. While engaging with ideas of objecthood, their irregular, subtly sculpted edges suggest a dialogue with ceramics or relief sculpture, creating works that seem dynamic and almost animalistic, reinforced by the occasional use of faux fur. The works embrace both structure and spontaneity, forming a dialogue between control and improvisation. Each work undergoes revision - layers are applied, deconstructed, and released from any preconceived notions of what the painting should be. This is a constant negotiation between painter and painting, particularly in abstraction, where each element justifies its presence as it's created. The balancing act between effort and accident gives these compositions their energy. 

Inspired by 20th century art and eclectic found objects, pigments sweep across the surface in broad, expressive notes. A single piece might swing from exuberance to melancholy, its palette shifting like light through stained glass. Robinson abstractly represents everything from fabric, fruit and wooden tulips to charity shop findings. Sometimes these findings are incorporated into the pieces, creating a transformation and divergence from traditional painting techniques.

Her compositions and palette choices are rich, playful, and textural with tenebrous blacks contrasting against bright reds and luminous greens to create rhythm. There are echoes of Fauvism in her bold, anti-naturalistic use of colour loosely depicting scenes of still life. This vibrancy creates soft visual tension, compelling our eyes to scan the surface to see where it all resolves. The landscapes of tone collide like weather systems. Through this expansion of design, her work invites viewers to reconsider what painting can be - how it moves, feels, and interacts with space. Robinson's rebellion against flatness is a liberation of colour.

Yasmin Robinson

What’s your favourite colour, and what draws you to it?

I’m always drawn to Cadmium Red. Finds its way into most paintings. Feels like it’s pumping under your skin. It just feels alive to me. Maybe something to do with it being a toxic heavy metal too; feels a little risky, a little dangerous.

Do you think in images, in colour, or something else entirely when you begin a work?

It’s more to do with energy. There has to be something that makes me want to pick up a brush. I chase that feeling until forms and colours start attaching themselves to it, until things start to gather and come into play.

Toe Jam

Oil, pigment and acrylic on stiffed canvas and panel, 2024

What influences your choice of colours, are there particular places, people, or chance encounters with objects that have shaped a piece unexpectedly?

I swatch directly from the things around me. The Irish landscapes in there, can’t get past that— although not literally, everything would just turn earthy and grey. It’s more incantatory, from the feeling of the place rather than its surface. I’m an over exaggerator.  It’s not thought out. I wouldn’t say, I have a distinguished palette. I pick up colours as I please, which means every painting feels like its own individual. It’s really about feeling, instinct. And then there’s the bric-a-brac. The way colours live together in a charity shop window, unexpectedly. The objects have influence too — they sneak in all the time.

What do you need around you, or within you, when you create?

Other paintings. My paintings are born from one another. Even though I have no interest in making a similar painting again, the next wouldn’t come without the last. I surround myself with them — they confront me. There’s no escape from what I’ve made before.

I need my paints, too — lined up like  a sweet shop, I get urges for certain colours. At the start of a session, I feel a kind of hunger for the act of mixing, it’s like devouring fast food —satisfying — but by the end, I’m left with a heaviness as if I’ve over indulged in what I’ve just immersed myself in. At that point it’s time to leave the studio, go home and have a shower.

How do you know when a piece is finished

When it convinces me. Usually, it happens when I return to the studio after a session, and in that first moment, I just know. There’s always this push and pull while I’m working — the piece is saying one thing, I’m saying another — and then at some point, it just… stops. Or maybe I just stop?  and give in. After some time, it becomes its own thing without needing me. That’s when its finished.