It’s almost like “painting with smoke’’ for Dunedin artist

Puffs of charcoal fly into the air as Rob Foote wields his trusty make-up brush across the paper. “These are my wife’s make-up brushes,” he says with a grin. “It’s almost like painting with smoke.’’ They have turned out to be the perfect tool to spread his home-made charcoal powder across a page producing the base for him to create his often surreal and nostalgic images. “Because it’s powder, you can really get amazing kind of textures and very smooth transitions. And then I use these erasers and you can bring it right back to the paper again. So I actually draw in the opposite way a lot of the time.” © Allied MediaDunedin artist Rob Foote brushes charcoal powder onto paper. Photo: Craig Baxter They are techniques he has developed in the past two years since taking a night, life drawing class. “The response to that was so great. Everybody was kind of, this is a really cool direction to go in.’’ So with his work in the digital illustration space starting to drop off, due in part he believes to AI, he decided to put more of his energy into creating fine art. “I also think the way things are in the world at the moment, there’s more of an appreciation for authentic tactile things.” Originally from South Africa, where he studied fine art, Foote moved into a variety of different fields including film set building and working in a bronze foundry. When he and his wife moved to Japan, Foote began picking up illustration work. “It’s been pretty steady since then, just being creative as a job. I feel very fortunate but it hasn’t always been easy for sure.” rob footeRob Foote’s Pigeon from his book “Samples from the lab”. He was brought out to New Zealand to work for an Auckland gaming company which shut down six months later. He was able to get another gaming job and then worked on the animated feature film Mosely which was voiced by Kiwi actors Temuera Morrison and Lucy Lawless. After a stint back in South Africa for his wife’s studies, the couple and their son, settled in Dunedin eight years ago. “We love it here.’’ His work in gaming mostly involves developing concept art, either the environments for a game or the characters. “It’s super fun. You have some constraints of the brief, but basically it’s create a world within this brief, and the concept artist job is really nice, because it’s just the ideas in the beginning, you don’t have to build it, or do the code for it, so you are very free to kind of create whatever.’’ A few years ago on the side, Foote created his own fictitious scientific journal Samples from the Lab, crowdfunding to self-publish the collection of drawings he had built up over the years and the story he created around them. The book was a finalist for the Russell Clark Award for Illustration at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. rob footeRob Foote’s character “Cowberrie” from his book “Samples from the Lab”. Photos: Supplied That illustration work has also had a big influence on the direction of his art work. “I think that’s imaginative building, and I really like being able to create things that are a little bit surreal, [that] don’t really exist, but you can imagine them existing. I think that really appeals to me.” Although the mediums are different, the actual techniques and rules of creating work are the same, he says. “I learnt a lot more working in the illustration field of techniques and ways of seeing colour or ways of seeing tone, and those things still apply in any medium that you use.’’ rob footeRob Foote’s “Frozen Time” (charcoal on fine art paper) His fine art work using charcoal powders is not home friendly though so a year ago he found a studio in the King Edward Technical building. There he does not have to worry as the fine powder spreads and covers everything. He wears a comfortable, fleecy sweatshirt to work in which stays in the studio. Specific containers for his different coloured powders are pulled out as he settles fine art paper on to an easel he made himself, complete with old tap handles to adjust its height. Once he has applied the powders he uses different kinds and sizes of erasers, some electric, swabs and tracing paper to create the designs and lines he is after. “Definitely using the powders has changed things a lot. Because you can really get like amazing tonal transitions.” rob footeRob Foote’s “Catch & Release” (charcoal on fine art paper) He also uses black pastel pencils for fine details. “The cool thing is is that although some of these areas are detailed, some are really, loose as well? And I think if you can get detail in the right places, it sells the whole picture as really focused, even though its not.’’ © Allied MediaA detail shot of one of Rob Foote’s charcoal on paper works. Photo: Craig Baxter He has also been experimenting with hand-painting details on the charcoal drawings with oil paints. It has been a learning curve as he has found it is easy to overdo the colour so it looses the “ethereal kind of moody, light feeling they have to them’’. “It’s almost like those old hand-painted photographs with kind of like washes of colour? So I think charcoal can be a very strong and powerful technique, but I think colour is really cool as well.” suppliedOne of Rob Foote’s cloudscape works. Foote is inspired in his work by natural world with most of his work featuring it in some way. “Personally, a lot of my best experiences in life have been in a natural space but also we live in a very unnatural world, in a way, so I think a lot of my work looks at that and kind of tries to speak a little bit about that relationship.” Over the past two years he has exhibited work in group exhibitions but “Vestigium” is his first solo show. “It’s been a lot of pressure, honestly. It’s been three months, and I’ve been working really late to get stuff done and it’s just you. There’s nowhere to hide.’’ The name of the show means “things that are left behind”. “The cool thing about it is actually it’s from a Latin word and it means footprints. My name is Rob Foot, so it ties in really well. “So, these artworks are kind of like traces of a past that maybe didn’t exist or used to exist or kind of surreal hints of something that is past. I really like to create works that are a little bit surreal and kind of have a sad nostalgia to them in a way.” suppliedOne of Rob Foote’s smaller cloudscapes. To see: “Vestigium” by Rob Foote, The Artist’s Room Gallery until August 7.